BRYN TILLY previews 57th Sydney Film Festival fanatic’s golden fortnight, every year it sure makes the start of winter a magnificent pleasure …
The 57th Sydney Film Festival Highlights
Movie buffs, cinephiles, film geeks, flickheads rejoice, it’s that time of year when all things celluloid and digital get the silver screen treatment. Yes, a rich, provocative, and challenging array of cinema awaits you at this year’s Sydney Film Festival , 57 years young and thriving. I can’t wait to get my movie hands dirty, so to speak. For two weeks the world’s best films, features and shorts, documentaries and experimental film making, clamber for your attention, screening at numerous cinemas around central Sydney.
This year Sydney Film Festival programme is divided into six “pathways” (categories/themes): Love Me (sweet, tough, passionate), Push Me To The Edge (gutsy, tense, challenging), Freak Me Out (cult, schlock, scream), Make Me Laugh (hilarious, dark, wry), Take Me On A Journey (dazzling, vibrant, exotic), Fire Me Up (real, provocative, dividing).
There’s a chillingly good retrospective – Immortal Seduction – of ten cult classic vampire movies including Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and complete version of Roman Polanksi’s Dance of the Vampires, in case anyone thought Twilight was trying to have the last word. New prints of classic Aussie flicks Love Serenade and The Last Days of Chez Nous, and acclaimed new feature, Boy, from talented Kiwi Taika Waititi. There’s the Opening and Closing Night Galas screenings; Shirleyy Barrett’s South Solitary and Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are Alright, plus the Dendy Awards for Australian short film, the Australian documentary prize, and Industry Conference Day. Thailand feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, just won the coveted Palm D’Or prize at the Sydney Film Festival.
A new-fangled addition to the festival is the Sydney Film Festival iPhone App, which features secure ticket purchase, up-dates, trailers, and the entire program at your fingertips, plus much more.To download go to iTunes App store and search for SFF2010.
The Sydney Film Festival venues this year are: State Theatre, George Street Event Cinemas (5, 8, 9), Dendy Opera Quays, Art Gallery NSW, Sydney Opera House. For complete programme and booking information visit the official website www.sff.org.au Don’t forget the FlexiPass option: 10, 20 or 30 select movies at a reduced cost, a great way to see a variety of what the Sydney Film Festival has to offer.
The Runaways
Wed 9 June, 9pm, State Theatre
Sat 12 June, 8.45pm, EV9
You should know Joan Jett and the Blackhearts seminal pop-rock number I Love Rock and Roll from 1981. But you may not be familiar with Joan Jett’s career before she went solo. She was rhythm guitarist with The Runaways, a rough and ready all-girl band formed in 1975, that took the punk rock male ethic and kicked it on its ass by presenting it fannyside (in American terms that is). With Cherie Currie on lead vocals, Lita Ford on lead guitar, Sandy West on drums, and a slew of bassists along the road, The Runaways blazed a trail of tainted glory for five years amidst the filthy glamour of late 70s rock abandon.
Kristen Stewart, keen to shed the forlorn lip-biting Emo and embrace the dedicated white trash, plays young Joan Jett with astonishing authenticity (frequently looking uncannily like Jett herself). Apparently Joan was on-set most days, no doubt providing invaluable advice on posture, expressions, and drug etiquette. 15-year-old Dakota Fanning plays 15-year-old Cherie, an Aladdin Sane wannabe darling, all platform heels and precocious swagger. Scout Taylor-Compton plays Lita (unfortunately with very few lines), Stella Maeve plays Sandy West, Alia Shawkat plays Robin Robin, a composite character representing all the different bass players who stumbled in and fell out of the band during the course of its trajectory.
Also of note is Michael Shannon who almost steals the show as band manager, the extrovert Kim Fowley, all fingernail polish and bad, hungry attitude. Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter Riley Keough plays Cherie’s twin sister Marie and Tatum O’Neal appears briefly as their mother. It’s a strong cast, but the focus is definitely on Cherie and Joan.
Based on Cherie’s memoirs, Neon Angel, executive produced by Joan Jett, and adapted for the screen by director Floria Sigismondi, a renowned multi-media artist and video clip director. There are some great visual touches, despite an overall TV-movie feel, albeit one that would have to played late at night! Sigismondi’s screenplay limitations are saved by the strong vibe created by the verisimilitude of these real-life characters.
There’s something strangely empowering about this clambering for success, despite the dissipation of energy, and the collateral damage.
You want sex and drugs and rock and roll? You got it. The sex is bi-curious, the drugs are of the amphetamine variety, and the rock and roll is grungy and basic, but smacks of drive and conviction. I had no idea The Runaways were a runaway success in Japan! Don your weathered leather jacket, smear your mascara, prop a Lucky Strike from the corner of your mouth, and slide into some smug motorcycle boots . “I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation/You’re livin’ in the past, it’s a new generation/A girl can do what she wants to do and that’s what I’m gonna do . I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation/I’ve never been afraid of any deviation/An’ I really don’t care if ya think I’m strange/I ain’t gonna change .”
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Sun 6 June, 2.30pm, State Theatre
Sat 12 June 12, 6.45pm, EV9
A year in the life of a (semi) legend, this disarming and profanely funny portrait of comedienne (who insists she’s a thespian acting as a comedienne) Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers, the foul-mouthed difficult Jewish woman now 75-years-“young” , with a face resembling a toned-down version of Jocelyn Wildenstein, is a wicked delight. The documentary traces the very long career from Rivers earning kudos and status on the Johnny Carson show during the 60s, eventually co-hosting it for twenty years before winning her own show and subsequently being blacklisted by Carson in response. The Queen of Comedy is a self-proclaimed workaholic and an empty day in her diary is a deep concern. She possesses a maniacal, yet strangely sad focus to succeed, twenty-four-seven. Filing cabinets are filled with thousands of cards with jokes on them, most of them lewd, lascivious, and distinctly un-PC, yet hilarious, like only good comedy should be. “Why are you in the comedy business?” she asks herself, “Ask a nun why she’s a nun,” she replies with a straight face. Rivers lives like lonely royalty, with a limo at her high rise apartment entrance on call, since 1968. Her personal assistant has been with her for fifteen years, while her roaming manager Billy is the only trusted friend whom she can say “Remember back when .” From gigs in The Bronx at 4.30 in the afternoon to Republican gigs in the freezing middle of nowhere, from Vegas to the Edinburgh Festival, Joan Rivers will play anywhere. She’s even starred as herself, with her only daughter, in a movie about the two of them Starting Again. She greatly admires Phyllis Diller, and assumes nonchalantly that she’ll outlast the legacies of Diller and George Burns. As the doco is wrapping up Joan is waiting to see if she’ll win Celebrity Apprentice. I’m sure Donald Trump understands hell hath no fury like Joan Rivers scorned. The wryly titled A Piece of Work is essential viewing for all stand-up comics and those who love the tragic allure of the cult of celebrity.
Teenage Paparazzo
Thu 10 June, 6.30pm, EV8
Sat 12 June, 8.30pm, EV8
“But I don’t go out to parties and drink all night long and get fucked up on coke,” explains 14-year-old Austin, and that’s why his mother allows him to chase A-list celebrities with his top-of-the-line camera ’til the wee hours of the morning in downtown LA. Aloof, but smug, bratty, precocious and foul-mouthed young Austin is in a league of his own; a kid earning a thousand bucks a pop for pics of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. Entourage matinee idol Adam Grenier was disarmed by him one day as a 13-yr-old a his huge camera flashing furiously in Adam’s face. Grenier was fascinated – just as this compelling documentary is – and decided to turn the camera on the boy in an effort to learn more about the realm of the celebrity mosquitoes: the paparazzi. But the doco eventually becomes more importantly about the pathetic real world of parasocial relationships, of modern society’s rather sad and depressing obsession with fame, the soap opera of the stranger whom we think we know through the saturation of contemporary forms of media. Children 8-18 years spend more time in front of video screens than any other activity other than sleeping, 44.5 hours a week. Twitter, Facebook, myspace, youtube . Yet there’s an irony to director Grenier’s mostly astute, albeit naïve, examination. In turning the camera on Austin he ends up feeding the boy’s appetite for fame, and as a result the kid is approached with a reality show as he’s fast becoming a small-time celebrity in his own right. Be careful what you wish for is an appropriate maxim for this social study. It’s real life vs. hyper reality. Everybody has a camera now, everyone is shooting everybody else and nobody is really doing anything. The myth of Narcissus rears its ugly head, as the desperate need to be recognized overwhelms the desire to be who were are. Society is so hard-wired into the cult of personality, with media so sophisticated it represents our inner desires before we’re even aware we’ve conjured them. This doco is a disquietingly powerful expose, yet there is a bizarrely hollow sense of being left as Grenier and Austin decide if they want to nurture a real friendship they need to turn the cameras off.
Space Tourists
Mon 7 June, 4.45pm, Dendy Opera Quays
Fri 11 June, 12.15pm, State Theatre
Anousheh Ansari was born and raised in Iran and would lay on her balcony as a young girl and star up into the cosmos and dream of being in space. As an American citizen and a billionaire business woman and engineer she paid $20 million to become the world’s first “space tourist”, training and joining two Russian cosmonauts for an eight day stay in the International Space Station. If you’ve got the wealth I suppose you should be able to do what you like with it. Curiously Ansari would prefer to never have had to come back to Earth; she prefers it to the plundered 3rd rock from the sun. Set to the sublime music of Jan Garbarek, Steve Reich and Eduard Artemyev, director Christian Fei has made an utterly illuminating documentary about the enigmatic theme of the past that is present in the future. We begin watching Ansari’s fall to Earth following her short, but monumental journey through the stratosphere where she gazed at the serenity of the blue planet through a cabin-hole of the claustrophobic space station. In an intriguing parallel we trace young Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen as he wanders through the eerie, deserted Baikoruv Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, opened in 1955, a massive complex which once housed 100,000 inhabitants and is the oldest and biggest space facility in the world. It was closed in the late 80s. Alternately the doco follows a ragtag bunch of space junk collectors as they drive huge trucks across the endless steppes in search of the booster rockets, the notorious stages that fall back to Earth (in Russia they fall back onto land, whereas the American bits fall into the Atlantic ocean). The valuable discarded metal is sent to China where it can end up as foil to wrap your sandwich (!) Finally we come full circle as the next space tourist trains up for his trip into the cosmos surrounding our planet. It’s a rigorous routine and of course immensely expensive, but this travel will eventually drop dramatically in price as the vehicles and procedures involved in commercial space travel become less and less expensive. Of course the key question is, will it and the kind of large-scale space station arrive before humankind damages Mother Earth to the point where she decides to shrug us into extinction? Ansari poses the thought that it would be nice for a few humans to be able to survive if everything does fall apart. “Here I am, at the centre of the world, behind me myriads of protozoa, before me, myriads of stars, and I lie between them in my entirety .”
