Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 188 i Metro

Where to Invade Next Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore returns with what may be his most provocative, subversive and hilarious film yet. In WHERE TO INVADE NEXT Moore plays the role of ‘invader’, visiting a host of nations including Italy, France, Germany and Tunisia to commandeer policies and ideas that will improve prospects in America. What he finds is that the solutions to America’s most entrenched problems already exist in the worldthey’re just waiting to be captured. The creator of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine is back with an entertaining and eye-opening call to arms. (MA15+) “Funny and always on topic without going overboard, it’s an engaging film that could broaden Moore’s fan base.” Hollywood Reporter Director: Michael Moore Release date: April 7 Remembering the Man At a prestigious…

There is a notion, long held, that the photograph can reveal something about a subject that is not necessarily visible in life. It has been suggested that the photograph strips away everyday defences and lays bare the soul. In his 1956 book, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, writer, anthropologist and filmmaker Edgar Morin traces this history of the photograph as souvenir, talisman or bewitched token, possessed of the presence of life even though the subject is absent. He writes: Everything unfolds as if, before the photographic image, empirical sight were doubled by oneiric vision, analogous to what [poet Arthur] Rimbaud called voyance, not unlike what psychics call ‘second sight’: a second sight, as they say, which in the last analysis reveals beauties or secrets ignored at first sight.1 The…

A knife glistens, blood splatters and violence lingers in the air as Coin Locker Girl (Han Jun-hee, 2015) unfurls its opening frames. The film is ablaze with confrontation during this striking sequence; however, though the situation is clearly tense, the fire that should rage behind the conflict remains strangely muted. Shades of grey temper the visuals, rendering the imagery cold and imparting the scene with a calculating tone. A sense of detachment not only emanates from the feature’s atmosphere and visuals, but also seethes through the performances of Kim Hye-soo and Kim Ko-eun. Both lead actors – the former playing the older aggressor, the latter, the injured youngster – are asked to conjure an emotionless mood and convey a disinterested relationship. The two women appear to be adversaries facing off…

Art may ultimately be all about empathy, but there’s still something strange about seeing someone bluntly unfold the intimate details of their life on screen. The act of storytelling adds a kind of distance, a generalisation of the intimate, and documentaries have always been comfortable playing with their own storytelling structures and perspectives. But there’s also something raw and potent about telling it straight. We’re frequently asked to consider how a story on screen is being told, but that shouldn’t mean that we forget that trying to present one’s experiences in as clear and direct a manner as possible is also a worthwhile – and difficult – artistic endeavour. Formal inventiveness is important, but so is maturity and insight. Margot Nash’s The Silences (2015) is a story told relatively straight.…

In Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann’s exquisite illustrated storybook and Oscar-winning animated film The Lost Thing (2010), there is a moment when the bottle-top-collecting hero of the piece, having chanced upon the eponymous boiler-cum-octopus-cum-plant hybrid – the ‘Lost Thing’ – spies a small advertisement in the newspaper. The Federal Department of Odds and Ends is offering empty spaces to accommodate ‘objects without names’, ‘troublesome artefacts of unknown origin’ and ‘things that just don’t belong’, and this becomes the eventual home of the Lost Thing. Even at a time when animation is everywhere – from mobile phones to mainstream cinema to multimedia installations – there is still a prevailing sense that it is itself something of a ‘lost thing’, a perennial outsider, accommodating a diversity of approaches, contexts and achievements, but…

The remarkable thing about adaptations is that, while they may have a well-trodden story and developed thematic concerns, they are burdened by the twin demands for fidelity to the original and adherence to conventional cinematic standards. This difficulty encumbers theatre director Simon Stone’s first feature film, The Daughter (2015), a work inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1884 play, The Wild Duck. In Stone’s adaptation, Christian (Paul Schneider) returns to his home town, after living for some time in the US, to attend the wedding of his wealthy father, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), and the much younger Anna (Anna Torv), Henry’s housekeeper. The timber mill owned by Henry is closing down, which threatens the jobs of many of the townsfolk, including Christian’s childhood friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie). Christian reconnects with Oliver and begins…

Tanna is representative of a continued, albeit gradual, swerve towards authenticity in the cinematic portrayal of indigenous peoples … giving a voice and visibility to cultures that have otherwise been inaccessible to audiences. The South Pacific region is not one that audiences regularly get to see on screens. Despite its enviable aesthetic appeal and rich history, the remoteness of its island nations and the limited resources and cinematic education available no doubt pose difficulties for people hoping to make movies there. Definitely more confounding is the fact that international filmmakers regularly step wide of the region, with only a small number of American and other Western productions having ever filmed in the area. This is in spite of living in a time when nearby, in South-East Asia, digital technologies have…

Being a school principal is a tough gig. A principal must be a teacher, an administrator, a counsellor, an economist, an accountant and, above all, a communicator. Principals are beholden to the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders – their students, their students’ parents, their staff, the government, even the press. Above all, principals must shape their institution’s identity, to create a place where their students feel welcome and ready to learn. Making a television show about a school principal has its own challenges. The Principal, a four-episode 2015 miniseries directed by Kriv Stenders, stars Alex Dimitriades as Matt Bashir, who is newly hired as the principal of Boxdale Boys High School. As the series demonstrates, the job of this harried headmaster proves particularly difficult – he encounters drama…

It’s popularly thought that Europeans brought the modern world to Australia. It would be more accurate to say that modernisation occurred concurrently with European colonisation. Arguably, for Europeans, the world changed more in the nineteenth century than it had in the previous two millennia; this was especially true for the first generations of European-descended individuals born in Australia. Over that century, steam power revolutionised distance and telecommunications revolutionised time. Cities enlarged exponentially and, in Australia, great cities sprouted from nowhere in a matter of decades. Google an image of Melbourne in 1836 and then an image of Melbourne in the 1880s (by then one of the world’s richest cities1 ), and you will see what I mean. For those whose lives paralleled this industrial revolution, the sense of flux into…

In The Big Steal, much of the comedy derives from character and situation, and Tass was keen to find the comedy in juxtaposition by cutting between the film’s two main families, the Johnsons and the Clarks. Setting the scene Is a car still a basic requisite for a young man’s coming of age? The emphasis may have shifted somewhat in the years since 1990; however, it is still broadly true that a set of wheels and someone special to share the front seat with is significant for many young Australians. A quarter-century since its theatrical release, The Big Steal (Nadia Tass, 1990) remains a timeless coming-of-age tale, a jaunty caper about getting a particular car and a particular girl, losing both, then winning the girl back again. In 2014, it…

CHEAP SHOT: SURVIVAL ISLAND 3 AND ABORIGINAL REPRESENTATION IN GAMES DANIEL GOLDING Surprisingly, the most widely known story about games relating to Australia in recent months wasn’t about an Australian game at all. Survival Island 3: Australia Story 3D is a first-person action game for iOS and Android mobile devices that tasks the player with testing the dangers of a risibly stereotyped Australian continent. The player, as a white character, can hack away at native flora and the odd kangaroo – or may instead choose to attack and kill Aboriginal Australian non-playable characters, which roam the game’s scrub with spears and painted bodies. ‘[Y]ou invaded their home!’ read some of the game’s advertising. Somehow, Survival Island 3 passed both Apple’s and Google’s content-regulation measures, and remained on sale for a…

NT LIVE Les Liaisons Dangereuses Following the hugely successful broadcasts of Coriolanus and King Lear, National Theatre Live brings the Donmar Warehouse’s highly anticipated new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to cinemas, starring Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey), Janet McTeer (The White Queen) and Dominic West (The Wire). In 1782, Choderlos de Laclos’ novel of sex, intrigue and betrayal in pre-revolutionary France scandalised the world. Two hundred years later, Christopher Hampton's irresistible adaptation swept the board, winning the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play. Josie Rourke’s revival now marks the play’s thirty year anniversary. LIMITED SEASON from April 9 NT LIVE Hangmen Following a sell-out run at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Olivier and Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Cripple of Inishmaan, In Bruges) returns to the…

The opening shots of Sue Brooks’ Looking for Grace (2015) present a drone’s-eye view of Western Australia’s wheat belt. Seen from above, the undulations of ridges and riverbeds resemble the songlines of Aboriginal art; the camera pans the topographical configurations of the terrain, drawing the eye across the patterned sweep and granting the simultaneous impression of continually shifting movement and the formations’ permanence. The sun-bleached colour palette, in hues of dull gold and dusky grey, mark a departure from the usual bright ochres associated with the desert regions of the outback. These had been a feature of Brooks’ Japanese Story (2003) and were similarly depicted, through soaring aerial shots, in her Road to Nhill (1997). Despite the geographical shifts, there are resemblances between the thematic territories tackled by these films,…

Greymouth on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island may not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking about demonic apocalypses, but it is here where the origins of the recent heavy-metal horror-comedy smash hit Deathgasm (2015) can be traced. Although the film is his feature directorial debut, Jason Lei Howden already had impressive experience as a VFX compositor with the renowned WETA Digital, having worked on films including The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013). Growing up in Greymouth, Howden was forbidden by his father from viewing horror movies – a well-meaning attempt to ‘protect’ him from their frightful depictions that perhaps guaranteed the young man’s obsession with the genre. What he couldn’t…

‘The type of story I wanted to tell was one where I was genuinely, personally challenged … And I think, to be able to really open yourself up to shifting your point of view or shifting your perspective, that takes time.’MADDIE PARRY In her series of three short films, aired weekly on ABC2 from 2 to 16 December last year, documentary maker Maddie Parry explores three controversial workplaces, trying to understand the people who work in these challenging environments. We follow her journey as she embeds herself in each job – she cleans equipment in an abortion clinic (‘Inside the Clinic’), works behind the front desk at a brothel (‘Brothel Hostess’) and becomes a temporary apprentice for a logging company in Tasmania’s native forests (‘Tassie Logger’). The ‘episodes’ seek to…