Launceston Film Society

Infrequent coarse language 

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 USA (2009) 
Director: Marc Webb 
Featuring: Jospeh Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend 
Language: English 
Running Time: 95 minutes 

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Fans of HIGH FIDELITY and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND will be charmed by this quirky film that sheds a linear plot in favour of a memory- driven look at a failed romance. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (BRICK) stars as Tom, a greeting-card writer who dreams of becoming an architect and finding his true love. Zooey Deschanel (THE HAPPENING) plays Summer, a vintage-looking beauty whose ideas about love are entirely modern. As Tom remembers his 500 days with Summer, his mind jumps from moment to moment, largely thinking of the good times in their trouble-filled relationship.

Indie darlings Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt are perfectly cast in this sweet, funny film. Anyone else would have caused audiences to hate Summer, but Deschanel is adorable enough that she still endears herself to viewers. Arthouse favorite Gordon-Levitt hasn’t played a traditional romantic lead since 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU in 1999, but here he proves equally adept at portraying Tom’s sweetness and his neuroses. Music-video director Marc Webb makes his feature debut with 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, and it’s easy to see influences of his past work. 

The soundtrack boasts songs from Regina Spektor, Doves, Feist, Wolfmother, and, of course, The Smiths, the band that brings the couple together. Webb also adds an innovative style to the dramedy, combining a naturalistic look at love with a non-linear plot, animated vignettes, and a triumphant musical sequence. The film’s mixture of cynicism and romance makes it perfect viewing for happy couples, the recently dumped, and the hopeful singles in the audience.

Source: www.allmovies.com –

Compiled by Sue Aylett

Coarse Language and science fiction themes 

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UK 2009 
Genre: Drama, Sci- Fi, Mystery, Thriller 
Director: Duncan Jones 
Featuring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey (voice), Dominique McElligott,  Rosie Shaw 
Language: English 
Running Time: 93 mins 

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Sam Bell  (Sam Rockwell) has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contract’s entire duration, he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only direct real-interaction is with GERTY (Kevin Spacey) the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect, he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated; he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. 

All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and their infant daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw) who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he awakens back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. GERTY tells him that a rescue team named Eliza will come to the station to clean up the aftermath of the accident. 

While recuperating back at the base (with no memory of how he got there), Sam meets a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three year contract Sam started all those years ago. Confined with what appears to be a clone of his earlier self, and with a “support crew”on its way to help put the base back into productive order, Sam is fighting the clock to discover what’s going on and where he fits into company plans. 

Source: IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes.com 

Compiled by Sue Aylett

Sexual references

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USA 2009
Director: Woody Allen
Featuring: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr, Carolyn McCormick Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr, Carolyn McCormick
Running Time: 88 minutes

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Whatever Works is a meeting of two of the screen’s most prominent sad sacks – Woody Allen and Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and also the model for Seinfeld’s notoriously self-obsessed George Costanza.

David plays Boris, a physicist who is so appalled by the way the world is going that he has retired from science, divorced his rich, clever wife and moved from their uptown apartment to a dark and dreary downtown bolthole more suited to his mood. Then chance introduces him to Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), who has run away from her home in Mississippi to a new life in New York. Sweetly clueless, she’s immune to Boris’ sarcastic remarks, which she interprets literally. This leads to plenty of typically Allen-esque cross-purposes exchanges but Boris grudgingly agrees to let her stay in his apartment until she can find somewhere else.

By now a sense of déjà vu is setting in fast for it’s already clear Boris is protesting too much. He and Melody are en route to a romance and the title, Whatever Works, is starting to sound ominously like a po-faced justification for the 40-year age gap between them.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the shape of Melody’s mother, Marietta, played by the marvellous Patricia Clarkson ( Elegy), whose smoky voice and droll gaze can adapt to just about any setting. She’s a chameleon and in this film, she does some particularly impressive shape-shifting. When first introduced, she’s a God-fearing Mississippi housewife and shortly afterwards, she’s ensconced in a ménage a trois with two of his friends. So Allen gives us a feel-good movie after all. In fact, he’s making a bid to make us feel just as good as we once did while watching the comedies of his glory days.

Source: Sandra Hall, Sydney Morning Herald

Compiled by Sue Walker

Mature themes

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Japan 2009 
Director/Producer/Editor:  Yojiro Takita 
Featuring:   Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue; Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo, and Takashi Sasano 
Language:  Japanese with English subtitles 
Running Time:   131 minutes 

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This extraordinary new film by Yojiro Takita yields no simple message but rather offers a kind of quiet and transcendental yarn that you can decode in many ways.  Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been closed down and now finds himself without a job.  He decides to sell his cello and move back to his old hometown, the fascinating Sakata, with his adorable and supportive wife, Mika (the touchingly elfin Ryoko Hirosue) to look for work.  Daigo answers an ad for a job involving “departures” thinking this is a job for a travel agency.  He discovers to his dismay that the job is actually for a Nokanshi, a funeral professional, who ritually prepares bodies for entry into the next life.  

While Mika and his old childhood pals despise his job, Daigo gradually finds pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of Nokanshi, taught by his boss and teacher – the marvelously phlegmatic Tsutomu Yamazaki.  Departures follows Daigo’s profound, funny and touching excursions with loss as he uncovers life in the midst of death. It is also a lovely tale of love lost and found and is one of the most quietly and beautifully acted movies for some time, in its concentration on the calm and somber moments of living as well as the as the accidents that await us all. 

It is quite simply a beautiful film and deserved last year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film by a long margin – for once the Academy got it right and Departures, in its own gentle way, is an instant classic. 

Source:    Jonathan Dawson- ABC 

Compiled by Sue Walker

 

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France, 2007 
Directed: Luc Jacquet 
Featuring: Bertille Noël-Bruneau, Isabelle Carré, Thomas Laliberté 
Narration in English: Kate Winslet 
Running time: 94 minutes 

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The Fox and the Child is the work of Luc Jacquet, the French film-maker who gave us the marvellous March of the Penguins in 2005. His new one is a charming, if somewhat over-sweetened, story about the trust that can develop between animals and humans. Shot in a spectacularly beautiful part of France, its supporting cast includes a bear, a hedgehog and a lynx, with cameo appearances by wolves, deer, badgers and rabbits. 

The child is played by 10-year-old Bertille Noel-Bruneau, who speaks hardly a word but has a wonderful repertoire of chuckles and chortles. Walking home one day after school, through an empty landscape of forests and grassy hillsides, she encounters a fox. The animal runs away from her, but the child is enchanted. (Has she never seen a fox before, I wondered.) Every day she returns to search for the fox, hoping to tame it and take it home. She calls her fox Lily. 

But life has its dangers for foxes and little girls. Lily is rescued from hungry wolves, the child gets lost in a cave. Eventually, with some subterfuge, she wins the fox’s confidence, and it is a lovely moment when it allows itself to be stroked for the first time. Following the animal into some dark, secret place, the child spends a night in the wild, awakening at dawn to find the fox sleeping beside her. I find it hard to resist this sort of thing. 

Towards the end we get a glimpse of the house where the little girl lives. We enter her bedroom. A car drives up. And suddenly a spell is broken. We are returned to a familiar world of buildings and machines. We are reminded that the fox, like all wild creatures, is threatened by urban civilisation. 

Source: Evan Williams -”The Australian”

Compiled by Peter Gillard

Violence and mature themes 

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Australia 1971 
Director: Ted Kotcheff 
Script: Evan Jones (after a novel by Kenneth Cook) 
Featuring: Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty, Donald Pleasence, Jack Thompson, John Meillon, Slim de Grey, Maggie Dence, Norm Erskine, Sylvia Kay, Peter Whittle, Al Thomas, Jacko Jackson 
Running time: 104 minutes 

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John Grant a gormless young schoolteacher  fulfilling his bond to the education department with a posting in a one-room school at Tiboonda, is a fathead from Sydney who has a copy of Plato’s dialogues in his suitcase and dreams of a life in London. A term-end stopover at the mining town of Bundanyabba –the movie was filmed in and around Broken Hill –takes him to a two-up game where he loses his entire pay on the flip of two coins. Stranded in “the Yabba”with its sweltering heat, choking dust, swarming flies and back-slapping local yokels Grant slides into an ocker version of hell. 

The cast is a joy with marvellous characters such as the leprechaun-like, habitually sloshed, bowtie- wearing Tim Hynes; his daughter, Janette, who keeps a house that the Women’s Weekly would praise but who is remarkably free with her favours; Doc Tydon, self- described as “a doctor of medicine and a tramp by temperament, and an alcoholic”; and Dick and Joe, two hulking, leering, joshing miners. Soon he’s burping boorishly with the best of them and frenziedly shooting kangaroos caught in the beam of a spotlight mounted on the top of the Ford. In the end he returns to the one-room school house, wiser only, one suspects, in that he can now accept a beer with good grace. 

Australians were intensely uncomfortable, when the movie was released, with being served themselves neat, unadorned. Even today we’re more comfortable with Dame Edna than with unblinking portrayals like Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright. 

Is the movie still relevant or is it a period piece? You judge. 

Sources: The Monthly, Urban Cinefile, The Movie show (David Stratton) 

Compiled by Owen Tilbury

Strong war themes and violence 

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Origin: Poland 2007 
Genre: Drama – War 
Director: Andrzej Wajda 
Featuring: Maja Ostaszewska, Andrzej Chyra, Danuta Stenka, Jan Englert. 
Language: Polish with English subtitles 
Running time: 119 minutes 

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In 1939 Germany invades Poland but so do the Soviets –taking many prisoners. 

The Katyn massacre was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, intellectuals, police and civilian prisoners of war by the Soviet NKVD, in an ineffective effort to leave the Polish people leaderless. Nazi Germany announces the discovery of mass graves in Katyn forest in 1943, levelling blame at the Soviets as part of the propaganda campaign, but as Nazi Germany finds the war turning against them, the Soviets maintain that the Nazis are responsible for the war crime. 

A brutal depiction of the Polish people and, on a broader level, a proud nation torn apart when attacked by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the film follows the story of four Polish families whose lives are torn apart when their husbands, fathers and brothers fall into Soviet hands at the start of WWII. The narrative is sensitively portrayed through the perspective of the women, who while waiting for their men and despite reprisals from the Soviets, they maintain that the USSR are responsible, a fact that the USSR did not acknowledge until 1990. Regrettably the fate of their loved ones gradually emerges from the discovery of crucial personal objects. 

Katyn is a topic which remains indelibly imprinted on the Polish national psyche, to the point – where even today – it remains difficult for Poles to discuss. A powerful film leaving viewer’s thoughts returning to it long after it has been seen. 

Source/s: www.IMDB.com 

Compiled by William Doudle

Coarse language, sexual references and nudity 

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U.K. 2009 
Director: Richard Curtis 
Featuring: Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, Philip Seymour Hoffman 
Running time: 116 minutes 

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Rock & roll history is being retraced in this appealingly ramshackle comedy from Love Actually writer-director Richard Curtis. 

Set in England circa 1966, the movie revels in the chaos that ensued when prudes at the BBC decided rock music was an evil that needed censorship and maybe banning. That’s when a renegade band of merry-prankster DJs, collectively known as Radio Rock, took to the sea in an old tanker and started broadcasting the devil’s music 24/7. 

The BBC, in the tight-assed person of Kenneth Branagh’s government minister, declares war. Leader of the pirates is Quentin (the sublime Bill Nighy), a man not adverse to drugs and hookers if they keep his DJs spinning. 

The boat is overloaded with eccentrics, including one American (Philip Seymour Hoffman having a rowdy good time of it) who calls himself the Count and works up a hot feud with DJ Gavin (a terrific Rhys Ifans). 

Curtis favours collages of ordinary English folk listening to the pirate station, ranging from teen girls to labourers and well coiffed housewives, to kids hiding their transistors under their pillows at night. These devices, along with the stylised moments like pub crawls for a stag party, make the film play like an old fashioned musical. This wouldn’t matter if it were one. But it’s churlish to nitpick, since the film has a marvellous sense of defiant, youthful exuberance which is crucial to its success. It’s also riddled with music of an era that reverberates with baby boomers and will lift its interest value. 

A little stretched and not always focused, the payoff is nevertheless a big one, with an uplifting sequence that perhaps should have been the ending. 

Sources: Peter Travers, Rolling Stone. Andrew Urban, UrbanCinefile  - 

Compiled by Gill Ireland

Mild themes 

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France,  2008 
Director:  Martin Provost 
Featuring: Yolande Moreau, Ulrich Tukur, Anne Bennent, Genevieve Mnich, Nico Rogner, Adelaide Leroux 
Language: French with subtitles 
Running time: 126 minutes. 

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An “oh-so-French” period piece with a central core of quiet mystery, this multiple award-winner at the Césars, or French Oscars, tells the true story of self-taught ”modern primitive” painter Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau). This is not one for those who like their movies obvious or fast moving, but one for the lover of nuance and depth of characterization.  In its first half-hour, little is revealed about its title character, a blowsy, middle-aged cleaning woman of few words who strikes up a tentative acquaintance with German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), who has his own reasons for hiding out in a provincial French village in 1914. War is on the way to sweep the old European order away, but when Uhde sees the paintings on wood that Séraphine has been making — inspired by her religious visions, and with paints made from secret ingredients — he is convinced he has discovered an unknown genius. 

Drug themes, frequent coarse language and violence 

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Australia 2009 
Director: Serhat Caradee 
Cast: Rachael Taylor, Martin Henderson, Daniel Amalm, Bren Foster, Ian Roberts, Les Chantery, Serhat Caradee, Taffy Hany, Drew Pearson, Buddy Dannoun. Waddah Sari, Vico Thai. 
Running time: 101 minutes 

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Tarek (Les Chantery), a young panel beater, lives at home with his parents and little sister. His close friend Nabil (Buddy Dannoun) works in his family contract cleaning business. Sam (Waddah Sari), his hot-headed mate, tries to make a name for himself on the street. Nabil offers his friend “in” on a heist that could set them up for life. Tarek is intrigued but he’s not a criminal and his family already has one son in jail, his older brother, Jamal (Bren Foster). Then temptation starts to get the better of him. Tarek dreams of owning his own workshop and living in a better area. His brother’s appeal has also stalled for lack of funds. And then there’s Amie (Rachael Taylor), the hot eastern suburbs girl he’s just met. She’s part of another world; exclusive, privileged and out of reach. It’s where he wants to be. Tarek and Nabil decide to take a chance.