73) The Gleaners and I

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)

Director: Agnes Varda

Starring: Agnes Varda, Bodan Litnanski, Francois Wertheimer


This is the final week of semester for Introduction to Cinema and to finish our unit on documentaries we watched Agnes Varda's multi-award winning documentary The Gleaners and I.

The ancient practice of gleaning involves going through after the harvest to salvage any grain or fruit which has been missed first time round. Since 1554 the right to glean has been protected by the French constitution. Agnes Varda meditates on the place of gleaning in todays society, exploring the different shapes it takes; people who eat left over foods they find in dumpsters either because they are too poor to get food any other way or because they are morally offended by the amount of food wasted, artists who create works from found materials, filmmakers doing the same.

In his review of The Gleaners and I Roger Ebert says that the film "appears to be a documentary". I like this description of the film because I think it sums up perfectly the way in which this film is not quite what we expect. The Gleaners and I is not an exposee on the place of gleaning in modern society, rather it is more Varda's personal meditiation on what it is to glean. This film is more of a personal essay than a traditional documentary, with Varda and her musings being so central to the film.

Not being a typical documentary means that Varda is not so concerned with telling us what to think about the topic. There are moments in the film where her exploration takes a more traditional documentary bent; when she draws attention to 25 tonnes of potatoes dumped in France each season because they are larger than the two to four inch diameter deemed most marketable, or when she briefly interviews both sides and the magistrate invovled in a dispute where a group of dumpster divers had vandalised a shops garbage bins in response to the owner dousing all of his rubbish in bleach to deter gleaners, but largely the film is more concerned with musing about the concept of gleaning.

Varda is known as the grandmother of the French New Wave. She made her first film, La Pointe-Courte, in 1955 and while not being a part of the Cahiers du cinema group she was an important part of the French New Wave movement. She is the only female director associated with that influential cinematic movement. I love this quote from her explaining how she got started in such a male dominated industry: "You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles. This is why I didn't know why I couldn't do it." Being a part of the French New Wave movement, and remaining much truer to her roots than a number of her male counterparts have since the movement finished, means that Varda's documentaries are very art cinema inspired and this is very much the case in The Gleaners and I.

Varda is very interested in the notion of beauty, so includes a number of shots and images in her film which she considers beautiful or visually interesting, but that don't necessarily build on the intellectual ideas being explored. One such example is the 'dance of the lens cap'. Varda filmed the documentary on a handheld Sony DV Cam, a piece of equipment she was very excited about and made sure to draw the viewers attention to. At one point she explains that she forgot to switch it off before slinging it over her shoulder and thus ended up taking a few minutes of footage of the ground as she walked with the lens cap swinging in and out of shot. She found something beautiful about this footage so opted to include it in the film. The scene is designed to draw an emotional response rather than the intellectual response we are used to documentaries seeking. The inclusion of the scene is also part of Varda's use of gleaning as a metaphor for her filmmaking. Here we have a piece of footage which to most people is rubbish, but Varda finds value in it.

I've seen this film a few times now and personally I find it difficult to get excited about. There are bits and pieces in it that are interesting, but I struggle to engage with Varda's meandering style. The fact that I was reasonably drowsy when I went to the screening this time probably didn't help. It's not a bad film, I just don't think I'm a fan of that personal essay style of filmmaking. If you can handle the lack of a central informative thread, and are happy to go with Varda on her digressions and tangents then you may well find something to love in this film, but for a lot of people I think The Gleaners and I is a confusing and frustrating film.

72) Carrie

Carrie (1976)

Director: Brian De Palma

Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt, Betty Buckley, Nancy Allen, John Travolta

I've never really been one for horror movies. Horror is probably the biggest gap in my movie experience. For my PhD and my Honours thesis before that I've been looking at the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s and one of the big features of that period was a rise in horror movies. So for a while I've had films like The Exorcist, The Omen and Carrie on my 'to watch' list but haven't got round to them. I picked up Carrie for $6.98 from JB HiFi earlier in the week and decided to harden-up and give it a look this evening.

Brought up in an oppressive home by an ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christian mother (Laurie), the socially awkward Carrie (Spacek) freaks out in the locker room at school when she has her first period. The other girls in the class are given detention for taunting her about the incident and when the school glamour Chris Hargensen (Allen) refuses to complete the detention she has her ticket to the Prom confiscated. Another girl, Sue (Irving, the future ex-Mrs. Steven Spielberg), feels sorry for the way Carrie was treated so arranges for her boyfriend, the class hunk Tommy (Katt) to take Carrie to the Prom. However, determined to get Carrie, Christ devises a scheme to humiliate Carrie in front of everyone at the Prom. Though what no one realises is that Carrie has telekinetic powers and you don't want to get her angry.

Brian DePalma is a director who I am yet to really make my mind up about. I was quite underwhelmed when I saw Scarface, which is hailed as a classic, but on the other hand I really liked The Untouchables. DePalma has an obvious admiration for Alfred Hitchcock, and this is particularly apparent in Carrie. DePalma has studied Hitchcock and uses him as the template for how to do horror and suspense, although it must be said that, at least in this film, he hasn't quite hit the mark in terms of building suspense. His homage to Hitchcock extends to the soundtrack where moments of high stress are marked with those same piercing, stabbing strings that we know from Psycho.

While the majority of the characters are pretty standard and two dimensional, Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie put in great performances as Carrie and her mother. Carrie is a really well established, relatable character. Not so much relatable in the sense that we know what she's going through, but relatable in the sense that we all know someone she reminds us of. Her mother, while being a slightly less realistic and relatable character is none the less a really intimidating, oppressive presence. It creates a really strong contrast between the scenes at Carrie's home which are really intense, and the scenes at the high school which look like they've come straight out of a John Hughes film, typified by William Katt's massive blond, Dermott Brereton style perm, and John Travolta straight out of Welcome Back, Kotter.

In fact, in general I find the balance between the horror element and the high school element in this film really interesting. Really, for the majority of the movie the supernatural/horror element of the story is simply not present. The scenes which take place at the high school feel like they come from a completely different genre. The whole relationship between Carrie and Tommy almost feels like it's come straight out of Pretty in Pink or any one of those 'gawky, nerdy girl is brought out of her shell be the heart-throb guy' movies. Except in the case of Carrie, just before we get the final happy ending moment the film takes a massive turn and we jump straight back into horror film.

What makes this movie work is that Carrie is not your stereotypical horror villain. In fact, if anything she is the hero of the film. Because she is such a relatable character, we understand why she does what she does. We understand the motivating factors behind her actions and as a viewer you are much more inclined to relate to and feel empathy for Carrie than you are any of the other characters in the film. It did make me wonder though what the overall message of the film was. When it was still in the middle of the John Hughes part of the film you feel like you're watching that standard story of the weird kid at school who, once you get to know them, actually isn't that weird at all. In fact they're a really nice person. But when the film takes it's massive turn at the end the message seems to change to "If you know someone who seems a bit weird, it's probably because they are weird. In fact they are probably even weirder than you thought." At the end of the film, while that sympathy for Carrie remains, largely you are left not knowing whether that is what you are supposed to be feeling, and how you should be feeling towards the other characters. But hey, maybe that is my inexperience with horror films shining through, not knowing how I'm supposed to engage with them.

Some people regard Carrie as a classic of the horror genre. Others think it's not brilliant. I'm probably leaning more to the latter. It's failure to really build up suspense means that rather than being terrified during the films climactic scenes, you just sit there thinking "What the hell is going on?" Sissy Spacek's performance almost single handedly redeems what would have otherwise been a pretty mediocre film. It's another one of those films though, that watching it will unlock for you an often cited pop culture reference.

71) Roger & Me

Roger & Me (1989)

Director: Michael Moore

Starring: Michael Moore and the people of Flint, Michigan.


We're into the final stretch of Introduction to Cinema for the semester and we are finishing with a two week unit on documentary. These days you can't really talk about documentary without talking about Michael Moore, so the film for this week is his debut film Roger & Me.

Flint, Michigan, is a town built on the back of the automotive industry. It is the birthplace and home of General Motors, one of Americas most powerful companies. However, when GM chairman Roger Smith endorses the closure of factories in Flint in favour of opening cheaper factories in Mexico, the one-crop economy of Flint collapses leaving the town in disarray. Watching the town he loves fall to pieces, Flint local Michael Moore sets out on a mission to arrange a meeting Roger Smith and invite him to accompany him on a tour of Flint, so he can see first-hand the consequences of GM's decision.

When Roger & Me came out in 1989 it was going absolutely gangbusters at the US box office and looked like a shoe-in for the Best Documentary Oscar. However the December issue of Film Comment published an interview with Moore by Harlan Jacobson in which he accused Moore of altering the chronology of the events in the film and tinkering with some of the numbers. Essentially, he accused Moore of advantageously misrepresenting the truth. These accusations damaged the film's reputation and ultimately Moore did not even receive an Oscar nomination.

Now the accusations of changing chronology centred mainly around two events. The first was a visit to Flint by Ronald Reagen where he took ten retrenched autoworkers out to lunch and encouraged them to look for work in Texas. This visit occurred in the early 1980s after the first round of factory closings when Reagen was a presidential candidate whereas Moore creates the impression that the visit occurred in the late 1980s, at which time Reagen was President. The other event was the city of Flint's misguided effort to try and transform Flint into a tourist destination by opening an Auto themed fun park, a luxury hotel and an elaborate shopping mall (featuring the city's only escalator). Again, this misguided use of taxpayer funds took place after an earlier round of factor closures rather than those in 1987 to which Moore refers at the beginning of the film. The argument can be made that the chronology of the events does not ultimately alter the fact that those events did occur and that they were symptomatic of the issue that Moore was exploring. What I find more interesting about the accusations is that it says a lot about what people's expectations of a documentary were then, and how Michael Moore subverted them.

People watched documentaries and expected objective truth. They expected the unbiased facts and when they discovered that what they were getting was a treatment of actuality rather than actuality itself they felt betrayed. We live in a much more cynical time now where we don't even expect objectivity from our newspapers or TV bulletins. We are conditioned to ask "Who owns this newspaper?", "What are the agendas here?" Whereas obviously in the late 1980s people were much more willing to trust their media.

In Moore's defence he never even suggests he is seeking to provide an objective account. That is not what Michael Moore does. Moore's films are highly subjective polemics in which the viewer gets Michael Moore's take on a particular issue. And in the case of Roger & Me he doesn't hide that. The film is, after all, called Roger & Me, not "Roger Smith and the GM factory closures in Flint". Moore plants himself in the title and thereby establishes himself as being just as central to the film as Smith. The film doesn't start with generic archival footage of factories with cars going along assembly lines. Rather it starts with video from Moore's first birthday party and his memories of growing up in a town which was in the shadow of GM. While they didn't expect that openly biased approach to documentary then, we have come to expect it now, especially from Michael Moore.

Whether or not you like Moore's polemical style, there is no denying that he is arguably the most influential film documentarist of all time, especially in terms of the popular documentary. No one gets bums on seats in cinemas for a documentary. You just have to look at a list of the highest grossing documentaries of all time:

1) Fahrenheit 9/11 - US$119.2million
2) March of the Penguins - US$77.4million
3) Earth - US$32million
4) Sicko - US$24.5million
5) An Inconvenient Truth - US$24.1million
6) Bowling for Columbine - US$21.5million
7) Oceans - US$18.7million
8) Madonna: Truth or Dare - US$15million
9) Capitalism: A Love Story - US$14.4million
10) Religulous - US$13million

17) Roger & Me - US$6.7million

The man has four of the top ten most financially successful documentaries of all time, including the number one by a fair margin. All five of his films have made it into the top twenty. The fact that Roger & Me, which was released well before Michael Moore had any sort of international profile, managed to take as much as it did is amazing.

One thing I found really interesting about watching Roger & Me is you are watching Michael Moore establishing the Michael Moore character we are all so familiar with now. Moore always sets himself up as the everyman, a kind of people's champion. Since he making Bowling for Columbine, and especially Fahrenheit 9/11, though Moore's profile has gone through the roof and he has become much more of a person of influence. His average Joe act is now very much that, an act. Whereas in Roger & Me we can watch Roger Smith ignore Michael Moore like he would anyone average punter, because in the late 1980s Moore was a nobody, today Moore is much more of a force to be reckoned with so the people he chooses to target have to be much more careful about how they approach him.

Roger & Me is an incredibly watchable film. It has all the things we come to expect from Moore, a serious issue approached in a personal way with smatterings of comedy. But what I think puts it up there with Bowling for Columbine as his best work is that there is something a bit more authentic about Moore in this film. He has not yet become too big for his boots.

70) The Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)


Director: Wes Anderson

Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, Kumar Pallana, Grant Rosenmeyer, Jonah Meyerson


Kate and I had a rare Saturday evening at home together so we decided to get some pizza and watch a movie (Kate doesn't watch movies as much as I do and I'm always happy to watch another). We settled on The Royal Tenenbaums. I'd seen it before maybe five years ago and since watching Fantastic Mr. Fox was keen to give it another look.

Various circumstances lead three grown up prodigies, Chas (Stiller) the finance whizz, Margot (Paltrow) the playwright and Richie (Luke Wilson) the tennis champion, to move back in with their mother Etheline (Huston). Their long estranged father Royal (Hackman), hearing that Etheline is considering remarrying, decides he wants to make amends with the family so under the guise of dying from cancer, moves back in. With the family all under the same roof for the first time in years a number of repressed issues start to come to the fore.

This doesn't sound like a typical basis for comedy, but that is because Wes Anderson doesn't make typical comedies. One of the most impressive things about The Royal Tenenbaums is the way in which it plays at multiple emotions. Unlike most comedies which operate in a single gear, Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson are trying to engage a number of different emotional responses. Thus the film has moments of big laughs, but also some quite somber moments. Amidst the quirky goings on of the Tenenbaum family, Richie's suicide attempt packs a really heavy punch. While other comedies may try and have serious bits in them, what is impressive about this film is the way in which the story doesn't even move from one mode to the other, but rather allows them to co-exist. This way you can have multiple layers to any given scene, with the presence of comedy not necessarily undermining the seriousness of what is happening. Anderson and Wilson rightfully received an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.

This was Anderson's third feature film, and his third writing collaboration with Owen Wilson. After turning a short film they made together into the feature length Bottle Rocket, Anderson really made people take notice with the critical success of Rushmore in 1998. None the less, the cast that has been assembled for The Royal Tenenbaums is absolutely incredible for a director only making his third feature. For starters you have two time Oscar winner Hackman in the title role. I can't praise this performance highly enough. In a Golden Globe winning performance (the Oscars very rarely take note of comic performances), he displays all his usual skill for playing ambiguous character while also showing a real flair for comedy which we don't see very often from him. The cast also includes Oscar winners Anjelica Huston and Gwyneth Paltrow. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson would both have been bankable stars on the back of Zoolander. Bill Murray is a highly regarded comic actor. Luke Wilson and Danny Glover are no slouches. He even got Alec Baldwin to narrate it. Major studio comedies would dream of a cast like that, but Wes Anderson just seems to have a knack of being able to attract big names to his projects.

Equally as impressive as the cast is the soundtrack. Music has always been an important part of Wes Anderson's films. As well as original music composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, the soundtrack includes songs by artists including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, the Clash, the Velvet Underground, John Lennon and Van Morrison. Those kinds of names don't come cheap, and while you can understand that an actor might work for below their market value if they believe in the film, I'm not sure that music rights are as easily negotiable. So it wouldn't surprise me if a larger than usual proportion of The Royal Tenenbaums estimated US$21million budget, which is not all that much for a Hollywood film, but would have been a big step up from the budgets of his previous films, went into music. But it is worth it. Anderson is really good at using music to set the tone of the scene, and not just through specially composed music. The use of the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' under the films introduction just works beautifully in establishing this family of weird and wonderful characters.

Like all Wes Anderson films you are either going to love it or hate it. Wes Anderson makes Wes Anderson movies and you either click with his quirky style or you don't. If you are someone who does, then The Royal Tenenbaums is a real treat. If you are someone who doesn't, then it will just seem like more of everything you hate about Wes Anderson. If you aren't familiar with his work, it's worth having a look and finding out which camp you are in.

69) All That Jazz

All That Jazz (1979)


Director: Bob Fosse

Starring: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Leland Palmer, Ann Reinking, Erszebet Foldi, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen, John Lithgow


I didn't know what I was in the mood to watch tonight. I considered a few things but none seemed quite right. As I looked at the DVDs on the shelf my eyes settled on All That Jazz. I'd bought it a while ago but had never found myself in the mood to watch it. With there being nothing specific I was in the mood for, now seemed like as good a time as any.

Celebrated choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Scheider) struggles with a lack of inspiration trying to choreograph his upcoming Broadway musical. This stress is compounded by his inability to finish the film he is directing, which has been in post production for months and is long over schedule and budget. With his personal life neglected for the sake of his art, Gideon finds himself on the verge of a complete physical and emotional breakdown.

There are certain movies which you just put together in your head, even if their is no real relationship between the two. For a long time I had always put All That Jazz together with Cabaret assuming it to be a sequel or an imitation as the covers looked quite similar. So I was quite chuffed when I discovered that they shared a director so there was actually a connection between the two. That director, renowned Broadway choreographer and film director Bob Fosse, should go alongside Hal Ashby (who I discussed in relation to The Last Detail and Shampoo) as another of the influential Hollywood Renaissance directors of the 1960s and 1970s who have faded from the popular consciousness unlike Francis Coppola, Robert Altman and Dennis Hopper.

All That Jazz is effectively an autobiographical film by Fosse said to capture his physical and emotional breakdown while directing and choreographing Chicago for Broadway in the mid-1970s. The musical we watch Gideon working on in All That Jazz has some visual similarities to Chicago, while the film about a stand up comic which he is also labouring over is an obvious nod to Fosse's 1994 biography of Lenny Bruce, Lenny (interestingly All That Jazz includes a scene in which Gideon is read a review of his film which criticises the direction of the film, while heaping praise on the actor who played the stand up, making me wonder whether Fosse felt he did not receive as much of the credit as he felt he deserved for the film's success, while Dustin Hoffman was widely praised for his performance as Lenny Bruce). As an autobiographical film, All That Jazz is a pretty tough piece of self-examination. Fosse doesn't really pull any punches in showing Gideon as a selfish, pill-popping, womaniser who mistreats those in his life because his only priority is his art.

There are similarities between this film and Fellini's 8 1/2. Both films explore the mind of the artist by paralleling scenes from the protagonist's life with scenes obviously taking place in their minds. There runs a thread of scenes through All That Jazz in which Gideon discusses different aspects of his life with a glowing, angelic woman, credited as Angelique, played by Jessica Lange.

It was interesting to see something quite different from Roy Scheider. I haven't seen a whole heap of Scheider's work but I've seen a bit. He first came onto my radar when I was a kid and he was starring in the TV sci-fi series SeaQuest DSV. While that is probably not the role he would have liked his career to be judged on, when I put it together with what I'd seen since of some of his more highly regarded performances in Jaws, The French Connection and Marathon Man, I'd placed Scheider in whatever the category that is not quite action hero was. He played policemen, tough guys, but not the muscle bound, superman type. To see him doing something very different in this film, playing a choreographer and director, was really impressive. He did a fantastic job of showing the gradual deterioration of his character under the weight of the different burdens in his life and rightfully earned him a Best Actor nomination (he was beaten by Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs Kramer).

All That Jazz is very much a sign of its time, very much a film of the Hollywood Renaissance. It is a slightly messy film in its attempt to be artistic and experimental. It is also an extremely self indulgent film. But despite it's faults it is a really interesting film and rightfully received a lot of praise, winning four Oscars as well as the Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. At times you might feel like you are a bit lost in this film, but once you get the flow of it it is really interesting.

68) Robin Hood

Robin Hood (2010)


Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Max Von Sydow, Danny Huston, Mark Addy, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Matthew Macfadyen

Despite going to the movies reasonably often it occurred to me that I don't do a particularly good job of taking advantage of tight-arse Tuesdays (for those unaware movie tickets are substantially cheaper on Tuesdays). So I decided be a bit more organised and go and see the new Ridley and Russ epic Robin Hood today.

When King Richard the Lionheart (Huston) is killed in battle in France on his way back from the Crusades, Robin Longstride (Crowe), along with Will Scarlett (Grimes), Alan A'Dayle (Doyle) and Little John (Durand), decide to abandon the Crusades and try and make their own way home. On their way they come across an English envoy under ambush on route to return the crown to England. The dying Robert Loxley (Hodge) requests that Robin return his sword to his father Sir Walter Loxley (Von Sydow). By impersonating Loxley and the knights of the envoy, Robin and his men find passage back to England. On returning the sword, Sir Walter encourages Robin to continue posing as Robert Loxley, pretending to be the husband of his daughter in law Marian (Blanchett), so as to prevent their land being confiscated by the crown. Meanwhile, the newly crowned King John (Isaac) raises taxes to fill his coffers, giving the job of collecting those taxes to his childhood friend Godfrey (Strong). But unbeknown to John, Godfrey is in cahoots with the King of France and is using the pretence of collecting taxes in order to stir up a civil war in England, destabilising the nation for French invasion.

When this movie first came onto the radar it looked like being something very different, and a lot more daring. If you think back a couple of years you may remember hearing that Ridley and Russ were teaming up to make a reversal of the traditional Robin Hood story in which the Sheriff of Nottingham, played by Crowe, was to be the hero. The film was supposed to be called 'Nottingham'. Then things started to change. At one stage there was talk that Crowe would actually be playing both the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood, obviously making some sort of 'different but the same' statement about the hero and the lawman. However, by the time the film hit the screen last week, what we have ended up with is a fairly conventional epic, even if it is not a traditional telling of the Robin Hood story.

It has become the thing to do these days if you are adapting a famous story that has been told before, that rather than do a traditional telling you make an origins story. This is exactly what we see in Robin Hood, the story of how Robin Longstride became the famous folk hero outlaw. The story itself is interesting enough, although the pacing of this film is at times a bit slow. There are pockets of the film in which it feels like nothing is happening even though when you think about it things are. However it is important to note that this is not solely an origins story as is that it is impossible for the traditional Robin Hood narrative to follow on after it. There are certain things which happen in this film which are incompatible with being followed by the traditional story. A simple example being that King Richard dies early in this film, whereas he returns at the end of the traditional narrative. Rather Robin Hood is a recasting of the legend. In an interview I saw with Crowe he insisted that he and Ridley had been working with the idea that everything the audience thought they knew about Robin Hood was an understandable mistake.

I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago about this film and he said he was unlikely to see it because he felt he had already seen it when it was called Gladiator. Having seen the film there is a similarity there. Like Gladiator, Robin Hood is visually amazing. Ridley Scott is back in epic mode for the first time since 2005's Kingdom of Heaven. The costumes and locations are fantastic and give the legend an authenticity that helps really bring it to life. There are some really good set pieces, the most notable being the final battle sequence at the cliffs of Dover.

A lot of people I'd talked to thought Russell Crowe was going to be too old to play this part, but having seen his performance, and the type of character that Scott and writer Brian Helgeland wanted Robin Hood to be, I think he was quite good. Robin Longstride was supposed to have been away for ten years on the Crusades so it would have looked strange if he was played by a handsome young buck. While there are similarities between Robin Hood and Gladiator, Crowe is not simply rehashing a character. Robin has much more of a twinkle in his eye than Maximus ever did and is driven by his moral sense of duty rather than a need for vengeance. I'm also sure that Crowe's wife was pleased to see him take a role which required him to get in shape rather than another role which required him to put on some weight (see Body of Lies, American Gangster). Cate Blachett is good as always (actually having seen her in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull maybe "as always" may no longer be an applicable statement) playing a slightly different Maid Marian than we are used to. It seems to be common in these recastings of traditional stories to transform the lead female characters who were traditionally damsels in distress into stronger, heroine figures, almost the equal of the hero they are the love interest for (for another example see Keira Knightly as a very Xena: Warrior Princess looking Guinevere in King Arthur). Thus, not only do we see Marian as the morally strong leader of her community and protector of her aging father, but she also pulls on a helmet for the final battle scene. However in a cast with a number of recognisable names the real scene stealer though is the relatively unknown Oscar Isaac as Prince/King John. Isaac puts in a great performance as a truly hateable character, managing to perfectly capture the ambitiousness, jealousy and arrogant sense of entitlement of the insecure younger brother of the widely admired, but in many ways equally flawed, Richard the Lionheart.

Robin Hood is not going to wow you like Gladiator, if we want to continue with Gladiator being the obvious point of comparison, but it is still a good movie. Robin Hood is a solid four stars kind of movie, it isn't going to blow you away but at the same time there is a lot to like about it.

67) Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane (1941)


Director: Orson Welles

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloan, Agnes Moorehead, Erskine Sanford, William Alland

This week in Introduction to Cinema we are looking at the idea of the film canon, so naturally we watched Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane.

After the death of media mogul Charles Foster Kane (Welles), journalist Jerry Thompson (Alland) tries to uncover the significance of Kane's last spoken word, "Rosebud", by interviewing the significant people from his life. Through the memories of those he interviews Kane's life is recounted, charting his rise to become one of the most influential men in America and his tragic decline to the point that he dies along in his mega mansion, Xanadu.

There are few films with as big a reputation as Citizen Kane. Widely regarded as the greatest film of all time, having held the number one spot in British film journal Sight & Sound's illustrious Top Ten poll every decade since the 1960s, Citizen Kane can be a very difficult film to watch. When you come into a film with high expectations you can often be disappointed. If you come into a film told it is the best film ever made, it is difficult not to have high expectations. The first time I saw Citizen Kane I thought it was good, but didn't quite get what all the hype was about, and definitely didn't think it was the greatest film ever made. However, this was the third time that I've seen it and I've found that each time I watch it I get more out of it and develop a greater appreciation for what is an amazing film.

Citizen Kane is an absolute masterclass in film technique. There are little things like the fact that Kane is always shot from a low angle to make him seem more imposing while Susan is always shot from above to make her seem weak, the shaky-camera footage of Kane in the opening newsreel to create the illusion we are peering through into his garden, and the movement of the camera from outside to inside through a window or a wall without seeming to break the flow of the camera movement. Then there are the more grand technical achievements; the incredible use of deep focus photography allowing for action to take place in clarity in both the foreground and background of a scene, the long takes and sweeping camera movements like the one in the opera house where we rise from the stage up into the rafters, and the bringing to life of a photograph of his newspaper's staff and the equivalent transformation of a shot of the front of Susan's apartment block into the cover of the newspaper. None of these techniques seem overly shocking to us now, but this film was made in 1941, nearly 70 years ago. When you compare the ambitious techniques employed by Welles with the cinematography of other films from the era it becomes apparent just how amazing an achievement Citizen Kane was.

As well as the stunning technical achievements, there is the narrative itself. The story of Kane's life is told episodically through the memories of the different people being interviewed by Thompson. Thus not only does the narrative jump back and forward in time, on occasion we see the same scene taking place from a different perspective. Welles is using quite a sophisticated non-linear narrative about 50 years before Tarantino made it cool with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

The cinematic techniques, the narrative style and even the story content combine to give Citizen Kane a very modern feel. When you consider all of this in the light of the fact that this film was Welles debut feature and he was only 25 years old when he made it, the achievement is almost sickening.

A first viewing of Citizen Kane also unlocks a number of references in The Simpsons. A number of the students in my tutorials commented on how so many of the scenes in the film were already familiar to them from The Simpsons. For example the episode about the three-eyed fish, "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish", parallels Citizen Kane in Mr. Burns' run at office, while the episode where Mr. Burns searches for his childhood teddy bear Bobo, notably titled "Rosebud", is practically one half hour homage to Welles' film.

Citizen Kane is an absolute masterpiece of the cinema, but while it sits at the top of so many lists of the greatest films of all time, it is important to remember that those lists are generally prepared by film critics, filmmakers or academics, that is, people who have an interest in film that goes beyond enjoyment. A lot of the things which commend Citizen Kane as a film are to do with the technical achievement of the film and the context of its production, things that may not be obvious to your average movie watcher. But putting all the film studies stuff to the side, Citizen Kane is still a really enjoyable movie, and while you may not come out of it understanding why so many say it is the greatest film of all time, you'll still think it's pretty impressive.

66) From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Starring: George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Ernest Liu, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, Fred Williamson, Tom Savini, Danny Trejo

It's Saturday morning and Kate has gone out for brunch, so as always I take the opportunity to watch a film that Kate would have no interest in seeing. I think I'm on the money with From Dusk Till Dawn.

Brothers Seth (Clooney) and Richard Gecko (Tarantino) are on the run from the law after a bloody bank robbery left numerous people, including policemen, dead. Needing to get into Mexico, they force minister Jacob Fuller (Keitel) and his kids (Lewis and Liu), to smuggle them across the border in their RV. They head to the rendezvous point, a biker bar called the Titty Twister, where they plan to spend the evening until their connections meet them at dawn. However, when it turns out that the Titty Twister is less of a biker bar and more of a vampire bar, surviving from dusk till dawn becomes a slightly more difficult prospect.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a really strange movie. It is strange because it is really two films. The first hour of the film is a crime/hostage movie with Clooney and Tarantino as characters who wouldn't have been out of place in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. The second half of the movie is a schlock horror vampire movie, much more akin to the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse. Both parts are quite good in isolation but together they just don't quite work. There is no logical connection and it is such a complete change of direction that you don't even feel like you are watching the same movie.

The Tarantino written screenplay has everything you would expect to find in a Tarantino screenplay: flashes of intense violence interspersed through lots witty dialogue. While Tarantino and Rodriguez are BFFs and seem to love working together, I don't know how well the collaboration worked in this instance. Tarantino has a real love for long, drawn out scenes of dialogue, whereas Rodriguez likes quick cutting action, which means the film has a funny, unsettled pace.

It's funny going back and watching George Clooney in films before he became 'George Clooney'. It is much like watching Jack Nicholson before he became 'Jack Nicholson', before the established persona shone became so prominent it pervaded everything he does. You see glimpses of the Clooney we know in From Dusk Till Dawn, but not the over the top charm machine that we see in the Ocean's films or in Up in the Air. This was Tarantino's first main acting gig. He appeared in Reservoir Dogs in a relatively minor role, but in this case he is under someone else's direction, there simply as an actor. I love Tarantino. I think he's a brilliant director and a great screenwriter, but the less time he spends in front of the camera the better.

In my blog on The Poseidon Adventure I talked about the disenfranchised minister being a reasonably common character, and he's back again in this film in the form of Harvey Keitel's Jacob. Much like in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs he has lost his faith as a result of his wife being killed in a car accident. But what makes this depiction stand out is that I have never come across a film that makes a minister out to be an action hero like this one (that being said I haven't yet seen Dolph Lungdren's performance in Missionary Man). Consider the following bit of dialogue:

Seth: A faithless preacher doesn't mean shit to us. But a man who's a servant of God can grab a cross and shove it in these monsters' asses. A servant of God can bless the tap water and turn it into a weapon... Now which are you, Jacob? A faithless preacher? Or a mean motherfucking servant of God?

Jacob: I'm a mean mhmm mhmm servant of God!

He then picks up the cross he has fashioned from a shotgun and a bit of wood and goes out and kicks some vampire butt. What really makes that line for me though is Jacob's refusal to swear. Whether that was scripted or whether that was Keitel, it turns what could have been a really corny moment into quite a funny one.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a decent bit of entertainment which doesn't ask to be taken too seriously. That being said it is still very much a flawed film which really doesn't flow. If you are a Tarantino fan, a Rodriguez fan or a schlock horror fan there is value in seeing this movie. If you are in anyway squeamish, or a feminist for that matter, steer well clear.

65) L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Director: Curtis Hanson

Starring: Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito, David Strathairn, Ron Rifkin

I can't remember the first time I watched L.A. Confidential. It'd be pushing a decade ago. But I do remember the first time I read James Ellroy's book on which the film was based. I bought it in an English language bookstore in Barcelona in 2003 to read while on holidays. I've never been a huge reader, but that was one book which I genuinely loved. The readings for Introduction to Cinema this week were on crime cinema, and one of them which was examining some of the conventions of crime films and crime fiction made mention of Ellroy, which was enough to inspire me to give this film another viewing.

In 1950s Los Angeles, an ex-policeman is among a number of people killed in a brutal armed robbery gone wrong in an all night diner. Three policemen; the fearsome Bud White (Crowe), the ambitious careerist Ed Exley (Pearce) and the show pony Jack Vincennes (Spacey) all independently take an interest in this case for different reasons only to find this seemingly inauspicious robbery appears to be a part of something much larger. With mob boss Mickey Cohen in prison, a number of his gang members are being knocked off as someone appears to be making a move to take control of the L.A. underworld.

Hollywood has always been a bit black and white morally, so as a result the film smooths over a few of the moral ambiguities that exist in the book. Exley ends up being played as a much more heroic character in the film than he appears in the book, and the films climax is much more cut and dry than how the book chooses to leave things. That being said, L.A. Confidential has an excellent screenplay (it won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) which does a great job of maintaining not only the mood of the book but the complex and interesting characters.

The characters are what really makes this film stand out from the pack as far as noir-inspired crime movies go. L.A. Confidential nails the atmosphere and the intriguing plot we expect from this genre but adds some really interesting, multi-layered characters to the mix, and these characters are backed up by some great performances from the ensemble cast. The three central figures, White, Exley and Vincennes, are all completely different styles of policeman. White is an angry individual. Haunted by the memories of his father brutally assaulting his mother, he takes a special interest in domestic abuse cases, taking vengeance on wife-beaters. He is seen by other characters as a thug, an animal, but we are shown that he probably has the most astute moral compass of anyone in the film. This was the big coming out party for Russell Crowe, with this role establishing him as a legitimate Hollywood actor. Two years later he would receive his first Best Actor nomination for The Insider. Guy Pearce also made the step up to the Hollywood big time with his performance as Exley, a careerist who lives in long shadow of his well respected father, and who finds being the morally upright cop he considers himself to be is actually not as easy as he'd hoped. For mine, the real gem is Kevin Spacey. This is Spacey doing what Spacey does best. He plays Vincennes, the shameless self-promoter who loves getting his face in the papers and lives for his job as technical advisor on the TV show 'Badge of Honor'. But Spacey gives Vincennes an extra level of depth. Ellroy himself described Spacey's performance as "some of the best self-loathing I've ever seen on screen."

Even the supporting roles are brilliant. Bassinger won her only Academy Award for her role as Lynn Bracken, a high class prostitute who looks like Lana Turner, by turning what could have been a very two-dimensional character into something really interesting. James Cromwell strips away all the kindness we associate with his face from his role as Farmer Hoggett to become something much more fearsome. Danny DeVito is also great in his small but important role as slimy tabloid journalist Sid Hudgens. Hanson really did an amazing job of getting the most out of a solid cast, but a cast which at the time would not necessarily have turned heads, given the low profiles of Crowe and Pearce.

Having shown such great potential with L.A. Confidential, which was magnificently directed and rightly earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, it is really kind of a shame that Curtis Hanson hasn't really shown that ability since. The most notable films he has made since L.A. Confidential are the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile, where he again cast Kim Bassinger in a supporting role, and the Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette dramedy In Her Shoes. He does seem to have a thing for Australian actors though having cast Crowe and Pearce and also Simon Baker in a small part in L.A. Confidential, Collette in In Her Shoes and Eric Bana in Lucky Me opposite Drew Barrymore. But hey, maybe it's just a coincidence.

L.A. Confidential is a fantastic film. It is one of the best crime/detective films out there. It got a swag of Oscar nominations, but probably didn't stand out as much as it would have at another time because 1996-97 was the summer of Titanic.

64) Chopper

Chopper (2000)

Director: Andrew Dominik

Starring: Eric Bana, Simon Lyndon, Vince Colosimo, Kate Beahan, Kenny Graham, David Field, Dan Wyllie

For our last week looking at Australian cinema in Introduction to Cinema we are looking at the crime genre, so watched Andrew Dominik's highly controversial debut film Chopper.

Drawing inspiration from the novels he published about himself while in prison, Chopper captures a series of events in the life of Melbourne underworld hard man Mark 'Chopper' Read (Bana). Chopper dreams of becoming an admired, famous criminal legend. The film shows him trying to establish his reputation first in prison, and later on out of prison among the criminal underworld. But the closer that he gets to the infamy and notoriety he desires the more his life becomes one defined by loneliness, paranoia and jealousy.

It is an interesting time to have just seen this film. With the recent press circus around the death of Carl Williams a lot of questions were asked about whether the success of television shows like Underbelly and films like Chopper glamorise crime, making folk heroes out of thugs like Williams and Read, and whether it is right that people like Roberta Williams and Fadi Ibrahim are regular features in the social pages. With this in mind it was interesting to watch the way that Dominik presented the character of Chopper. I have never watched Underbelly so can't comment on that, but make no mistake, there is nothing glamorous about the way in which Mark Read is presented in this film. Much like in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Dominik consciously adopts a non-judgemental stance in his presentation of Chopper, preferring to let the character speak for himself. Chopper is not a run of the mill crime/gangster story. It is a character exploration. It was difficult to write a narrative summary of the film because there is not really a central storyline. Rather the film is an exploration of the character of Mark Read. What we see is a slightly deranged, verging on split personality, shameless self publicist, and while he manages to achieve to a degree the fame and notoriety that he desires he is shown to be a paranoid, untrusting and ultimately lonely man. It is hard to argue that Chopper in any way glamorises the criminal lifestyle, because I don't think there is anyone out there who would watch Chopper and wish he could switch places with Read.

Andrew Dominik is quite a highly touted Australian director, but not one people know all that much about. He followed up Chopper seven years later with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (one of the longer film titles in recent years). Part of the reason he's not so well known, other than the fact that he hardly churns out the movies, is the style of films he makes. Dominik appears to be heavily influenced by art films, meaning that he is not as easily marketable as a Baz Luhrmann or George Miller. This art film influence can be easily seen in Chopper, which is visually quite an interesting film. Dominik and his cinematographers Geoffrey Hall and Kevin Hayward makes interesting use of colour, particularly in creating a claustrophobic, dirty feel in the homes that Chopper visits, as well as camera technique. Particularly notable is the scene in which Read has just snorted some speed and they achieve a slightly twitchy visual by filming everything at half speed and then speeding it up to normal pace. The ambiguity of the narrative is also suggests an art film influence, particularly in the shooting of Sammy the Turk late in the film where we see the same scene enacted three times; firstly what "actually" happened, secondly the story that Chopper tells to the police, and thirdly a poetic, almost vaudevillian interpretation of the scene demonstrating how each time the story is retold the myth gets larger and more consciously dramatic.

Eric Bana is a real force in this film. It is his performance which makes this film so engrossing. His ability to balance just enough charm to make you like the guy, with the rage and unstable personality of a psychopath to make you disgusted that you do. While he has gone on to hit it big in Hollywood, appearing in a diverse range of films including Black Hawk Down, Troy, The Hulk, Funny People, Star Trek and Munich, it is important to remember that when he was cast in the lead in Chopper he was just that guy from the sketch comedy show Full Frontal and his only feature film experience was a small part in The Castle. To entrust a comedian with the title role, with his performance really likely to make or break the film, was a huge gamble. But it paid off. This was the performance that launched Bana into the spotlight. It would be his performance as Mark Read rather than as Ray Martin or Poida which helped him get his foot in the door in Hollywood. When you see Chopper you understand why.

This film is not going to be for everyone. It has an R18+ rating for a reason. There is a fair bit of violence and some of the language is equally confronting. But whether or not Chopper is your kind of film, there is no denying that it is a very brave film. It was a brave subject for Dominik to tackle in his feature film debut as a director. It was a brave move to cast a comedian, an unknown acting commodity, in the title role. It was a brave move to incorporate some art house style visuals into a film which was expected to be a more run of the mill crime movie. There is a lot to admire Chopper, the film that is, not the man.

63) The Poseidon Adventure

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)


Director: Ronald Neame

Starring: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Shelley Winters, Pamela Sue Martin, Eric Shea, Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens, Jack Albertson, Leslie Nielsen

Kate was at college tonight so I had my choice of what to watch. As someone who is spooked by they thought of drowning, I figured she would have little interest in watching The Poseidon Adventure, a film which is pretty much the last hour of Titanic without all the lovey-dovey stuff.

On it's final voyage, the USS Poseidon is hit by a tidal wave on New Years Eve and is overturned. With everything now upside down and the ship filling with water Reverend Frank Scott (Hackman) tries to convince people that there is no option but to go down, which is now up, to the engine room. With the vast majority of passengers preferring to listen to official instructions and stay in the ballroom, Scott sets off with a small bunch of followers including an ex-cop (Borgnine) and his prostitute wife (Stevens), an elderly couple (Winters and Albertson), a folk singer (Lynley), a kindly haberdasher (Buttons) and an unaccompanied young sister and brother (Martin and Shea).

The 1970s saw a bit of a disaster movie phase hit Hollywood. Airport got the ball rolling in 1970, and The Poseidon Adventure saw the craze build momentum. The disaster movie cycle probably hit it's peak in 1974 with the release of The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Airport 1975. While a few notable disaster films cropped up in the late 1970s, largely the cycle started to flounder with lesser sequels like Airport '77, The Concord... Airport '79 and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and blockbuster flops like Meteor and When Time Ran Out.... By 1980 the disaster cycle was completed when the Zucker brothers released their comedy Airplane! which spoofed the cliches of the genre.

The Poseidon Adventure is a really poorly written film. It is going for a thrill-a-minute, race-against-the-clock kind of feel, but never really grips you. All of the characters are quite two-dimensional, with literally no character development as the film progresses. Obviously, the narrative of the story takes place over a very short period of time, so you can't expect standard character arcs, but not having investment in the characters takes a bit of the tension out of their struggle for survival. The clear deficiencies in the script make me assume their must have been some decent money on the table to attract the names that appear in this cast.

I'm usually a big fan of Gene Hackman's work, but not so much in this case. I couldn't work out as a viewer whether I was supposed to like him or not. I also was not entirely sure what I was supposed to get out of the fact that he was a minister. The disenfranchised minister is character that has been used before, but this is one of the weakest uses of that character I've seen. You can't even work out why he ever became a minister in the first place. The things he teaches seem to have no relation to the Christian concept of God, he sounds more like a self-help, motivational speaker. He seemed to have no real compassion for people, only frustration that they were dumber than him. This all meant that as a viewer you never really got on his side, making his act of self sacrifice, and cursing of God, at the end of the film a much less potent scene than I'm assuming they were hoping for.

Special mention has to go to Ernest Borgnine who puts in what is undoubtedly one of the all time great shouting performances in this movie. He shouts literally 90% of his lines, even lines which are just part of a conversation. It is quite amazing.

The Poseidon Adventure won an Special Achievement Award for Visual effects at the Oscars, and while they appear dated to our CGI accustomed eyes, they do an admirable job of creating the illusion of a sinking ship through the use of sets, camera angles, sound effects and lots and lots of water. As a result the film also received nominations for cinematography, art-direction and set-direction, editing, sound and musical score. Amazingly the film also won Best Original song for "The Morning After", the song performed by a travelling folk group at the New Years Eve party. Must have been a lean year music-wise.

I'm part of the generation who is only used to seeing Leslie Nielsen in spoof comedies (Naked Gun, Spy Hard, Wrongfully Accused, Dracula: Dead and Loving It), which makes it quite difficult to take him seriously when you see him in an earlier film in a serious role. This is especially difficult in The Poseidon Adventure given he is playing the ship's captain, exactly the type of role you would expect him to show up in if the film was a spoof.

The Poseidon Adventure is a film which were it not for it's quite impressive cast, probably wouldn't rate much of a mention today. It is funny though, because I think the great cast might even hurt this film today, because it alters our expectation. We associate Hackman, Borgnine and Winters with classic films, whereas that is not what The Poseidon Adventure was shooting for. It was a blockbuster popcorn movie. Think a 1970s equivalent of Speed rather than Titanic. If you come into it with the right mindset you'll forgive a lot of this film's weaknesses. But even then, The Poseidon Adventure is ok for what it is, but there are plenty of other films worth seeing before you get to this one.

62) Quiz Show

Quiz Show (1994)

Director: Robert Redford

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow, John Turturro, David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Paul Scofield, Martin Scorsese

1994 was one of the strongest years for Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards for a long time. While Forrest Gump ended up taking the award, you would hardly have called it an upset if the gong had gone to The Shawshank Redemption or Pulp Fiction, although people may have been a bit puzzled if Four Weddings and a Funeral had got up. The film that rounded out this group was Robert Redford's Quiz Show.

This true story is set in the 1950s, quiz shows like "The $64,000 Question" and "Twenty-One" ruled the television ratings in America. Howard Stempel (Turturro) has been carry over champ on "Twenty-One" for a number of weeks, and millions have been tuning in to watch him approach the $100,000 winnings mark. But when sponsors and NBC executives notice that the ratings are starting to plateau and the people's interest in Stempel is waning they decide it is time for a change. They instruct Stempel to take a dive, and start feeding the answers to charming intellectual Charles Van Doren (Fiennes). As Van Doren's winning streak continues, his popularity goes through the roof. He becomes a folk hero, appearing on the cover of "Time" magazine, but all the while is conflicted with the knowledge he is defrauding a nation. When a bitter Stempel is swept under the carpet while trying to blow the lid on the fixing of the show, an idealistic young Congressional investigator, Dick Goodwin (Morrow), takes an interest in the case, seeing the opportunity to put television on trial.

I've got to admit, I was kind of underwhelmed with this film. It wasn't bad by any means. It was quite good. It just didn't grab me. It wasn't a case of having come into the film with overly high expectations either, as despite having a couple of friends mention that it was worth a look, I was largely unaware of the critical reception of the film (plenty of five star reviews). As I've thought about the film I'm actually finding it quite difficult to isolate what it was about the film disappointed me.

The film has a decent cast. Fiennes fits the bill perfectly as the disarming Van Doren. He does a fantastic job of displaying the conflict the character must have felt. Van Doren was, after all, a very intelligent man and you'd have to say would have been more than capable of doing quite well on the show on his own, but the lure of the money is too great. The relationship between Charles and his father Mark (played by Paul Scofield who received a Best Supporting Actor nomination) is particularly interesting. John Turturro is always great value as a supporting actor. Despite getting top billing for Quiz Show he is far from the main character. He features prominently early, but slips into the background in the middle of the film. He is very good as the anti-Van Doren. Stempel is awkward and uncomfortable. While Van Doren oozes intelligence, Stempel strikes people more as a sponge who has just absorbed information.

The one bit of casting which I really could not get past though was Rob Morrow as Dick Goodwin. Morrow is best known for his role as Joel Fleischman in "Northern Exposure" and to a lesser extent Don Eppes in "Numb3rs". I think the fact that I consider him primarily as a television actor made it quite difficult to accept him in the role which was arguably the main role of the film. Goodwin was our point of reference, he was the moral compass in the film and it just felt to me like the role demanded someone with a bit more gravitas, someone a bit more engaging. This may be overly harsh on him as it is not as though he put in a bad performance (although he was sporting these ridiculously thick eyebrows which stole the scene whenever he was on screen. Surely they must have been fake), but he just stood out when put next to Fiennes and Turturro.

Some notable people in minor roles in Quiz Show were fun to notice. I don't know if Redford called in some favours but he had directors Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) and Martin Scorsese playing small roles as "Today" host Dave Garroway and Geritol boss Martin Rittenhome respectively. If you keep you eyes peeled you also notice a young, pre-"Ally McBeal" Calista Flockhart playing one of Charles's students and a young Ethan Hawke in an uncredited role as one of Mark Van Doren's students.

Despite the fact that it is quite a good screenplay with some clever dialogue and good characterisation I found the structuring of the story a bit funny. Rather than having a standard Hollywood three act structure, this felt more like it had four or five shorter acts. When Van Doren finishes his time on the show, part of you feels like that is the end of the story, but then you remember there is the whole investigation which is just starting to get going and we move into the next act.

Interestingly, the makers of Quiz Show did attract criticism from some corners for applying some quite liberal poetic license in the retelling of the story, changing a few facts, tinkering with chronology and elevating the centrality of some characters, namely Goodwin. It can't help but strike you as slightly ironic that this film which seeks to shine a light on the television industry using entertainment as justification for deception in a way has been accused of the very same thing.

Quiz Show is an interesting film. It takes the central story of a rigged game show as a starting point to explore much bigger issues about the influence of big business, priorities of education and entertainment in the media, the cult of celebrity and the tension between Jews and WASPs in 1950s America. Redford does an admirable job of recreating the 1950s and tells a good story. Quiz Show is a good film, but for mine it is not a great film. There was just something about it which failed to engage me, but other than being unconvinced by the casting of Morrow, I can't put my finger on what it is.

61) Samson and Delilah

Samson and Delilah (2009)

Director: Warwick Thornton

Starring: Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson, Scott Thornton

Introduction the Cinema this week is looking at Indigenous cinema. For the last few years we've watched Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes for this topic but with Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah going gangbusters and winning awards all over the world it seemed logical to make the switch.

Samson (McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) are two Aboriginal teenagers living in a small community outside of Alice Springs. Delilah's life is consumed by taking care of her aging grandmother (Mitjili Napanangka Gibson), while Samson leads a largely purposeless existence, constantly stoned on petrol fumes. A tragic turn prompts Samson and Delilah to run away from their community and head for Alice Springs. However the grass proves to be no greener on the other side of the hill as they find themselves with no option but to live under an overpass with an Indigenous hobo called Gonzo (Thornton). As they continue to struggle for survival, Samson and Delilah grow ever more dependent on each other, demonstrating the strength, devotion and non-judging nature of love.

2009 was a pretty good year for Australian film in terms of the quality of some of the films that were released. Usually the AFIs are a one horse race but in 2009 we had Samson and Delilah, Balibo, Mary & Max, Last Ride, Beautiful Kate, Cedar Boys and a couple of others all drawing a bit of attention. The fact that hardly any of them attracted a box office audience is another matter entirely, but we were at least making some good films. The jewel in the crown though was, no doubt, Samson and Delilah. Made on a small budget (Thornton takes great joy in letting people know that the entire budget for his film was equivalent to the catering budget for Baz Luhrmann's Australia) this film has made noise both in Australia, winning AFI awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Director, and abroad, winning Best film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and the Dublin International Film Festival and the Golden Camera for Best Debut Feature at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

The tag line for the film is 'True Love' and Thornton is adamant that what he has made here is a love story, not a political film. While politics is seemingly always going to be a presence in Indigenous cinema at the moment, simply because so many of the Indigenous issues the films explore are political issues, this film doesn't set out to lecture or finger point. Despite it's harsh realism it is not a documentary, it is a personal story. It is a love story. That being said, it is not the sort of love story we are used to. I don't think their is anything overly romantic about the film. It is not a love story in the sense that we are watching a boy and a girl stare longingly into each others eyes and swooning. Samson and Delilah explores love beyond the more shallow level of romance. It looks at the complete dependence of these two on each other and their undying, non-judging devotion to each other, and in doing that effectively it becomes quite a powerful love story.

The first thing that strikes you about Samson and Delilah is the lack of dialogue in the film. In the entire film Samson only says one word, his name, and while Delilah says a little bit more the two of them never talk to each other. Rather all of the communication between the two is non-verbal, through looks and gestures. As film viewers we are so conditioned to getting our narrative information and character development verbally that it is challenging when that is not the case. But the silence of this film is quite powerful. However, despite the fact that our two protagonists are reasonably quiet, sound, particularly music, plays an important role in the film. From the endlessly repetitive song that Samson's brother's band jams to on his front porch to Delilah's Spanish music cassette she listens to in the car for a bit of privacy, to the drunken singing of Gonzo and the songs coming through the indigenous radio station Samson listens to, music is a reasonably constant presence within the film.

The smallish cast puts in some powerful performances. Performances made all the more impressive by the fact that the cast is made up largely of non-actors. Warwick Thornton grew up in Alice Springs and nearby communities so in an effort to achieve a level of authenticity he auditioned local kids for the two lead roles, and that authenticity does seem to shine through in the faces of McNamara and Gibson, faces which you really feel have seen more than someone of 14 or 15 years of age should have. With the lack of dialogue and the dependence of the narrative on more subtle acting through looks and gestures, it is truly remarkable the performances he has managed to get from McNamara and Gibson. In an interview on the making of the film Thornton admitted that unlike most films today there was absolutely no room for improvisation in the shooting of the film. Every glance, every shrug, every gesture was scripted and had to be followed in order for the story to work. So if nothing else McNamara and Gibson did a wonderful job of obeying instructions.

The casting of the film was also quite a family affair with Marissa Gibson (Delilah), Mitjili Napanangka Gibson (Nana) and Matthew Gibson (Samson's brother) all being related, and the role of Gonzo going to Warwick Thornton's brother Scott. Scott had been an alcoholic since he was 16 and was largely the inspiration for the character, so Warwick offered him the role on the condition go through rehab. Scott puts in a bit of a scene stealing performance as Gonzo, and needless to say plays a pretty good drunk.

Samson and Delilah is a very powerful film which packs an emotional punch without feeling preachy. Thornton effectively presents issues and questions without trying to offer the answers or attribute blame. It is arguably the most important Australian film of recent years and it is a bit of a shame that it ended up getting only a fraction of the audience that went to see the quite good but infinitely more shallow Australia.