Launceston Film Society

Next movie will be 20th September 2010

Infrequent Coarse Lauguage

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Origin: Italy, 2009

Directed and written by: Gianni Di Gregorio

Featuring: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria De Franciscis, Marina Cacciotti, Maria Calì, Grazia Cesarini Sforza, Alfonso Santagata, Luigi Marchetti

Language: Italian with subtitles

Running time: 75 minutes

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Thoughtful, warm-hearted, and delightfully free of pretence, Mid-August Lunch offers members a light diversion with some surprising depth. This enchanting film in which director and writer Gianni Di Gregorio also stars, offers a simple but mesmerising slice of life in suburban Rome in summer, where his protagonist, Gianni, finds himself at the mercy of the whims of four older women for the mid-August Italian holiday of Ferragosto.

Gianni is a late middle aged bachelor who has always lived with his doting mother. For Gianni, looking after his ninety years old mother is a full time job and there is no time to earn money to pay all the bills. Suddenly there is a shift in the daily routine, when Gianni finds himself looking after three other older women, whose families have gone away for the holiday. Not only are his guests demanding, but they have strong opinions too. This drama is all about the characters and their relationships and we become fascinated by them all. Tempers fray, issues arise as the women become stubborn, impatient, demanding and refuse to comply with the expectations placed on them. It’s a film overflowing with small pleasures.

Remarkably, the elderly women have never acted before and Di Gregorio extracts wonderful, natural performances from them all. Nothing much happens, yet the lives of all the characters change.

Original review by: Louise Keller, Urban Cinefile

Extracted and compiled by: SC Patton

Mature Themes

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U.K. 2009

Directed by: Lone Scherfig   Written by: Nick Hornby

Featuring: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina

Running Time: 95 minutes

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Schoolgirl Jenny is 16 and a virgin. Sophisticated David is twice her age and ready to pounce. The time is 1961. The place is England just before it learned to swing. So begins An Education; a quiet miracle of a movie that quickly disabuses you of the idea that you’ve seen it all before.

Prepare to be wowed by Carey Mulligan, whose sensational, starmaking performance as Jenny ignited film festivals from Sundance to Toronto. The incandescent Mulligan, 24, is a major find who makes Jenny’s journey from gawky duckling to sad, graceful swan an unmissable event. As David, Peter Sarsgaard is shockingly good at walking the line between charming opportunist and sexual predator. This story about a girl is brilliantly adapted by About a Boy author Nick Hornby, who finds a timeless resonance in the battle between rigid, formal education and messy, carnal life.

An Education is remarkable for the traps it doesn’t fall into. Jenny, for all her naive impulses, isn’t a victim. She thrills to the concerts, jazz clubs and chic restaurants on David’s merry-go-round. She doesn’t see anything devious in David or his pals, dashing Danny (Dominic Cooper) and blonde goddess Helen (Rosamund Pike). They are everything glamorous that’s been out of her reach. At school, Jenny scandalizes the headmistress (an acid-tongued Emma Thompson) and presents David as a viable alternative to Oxford. It’s a teacher who pulls her up short: “You can do anything, Jenny, you’re clever and pretty. Is your boyfriend interested in the clever Jenny?”

The movie arranges an unsentimental education for both mismatched lovers, and there’s no denying the collateral damage. You won’t forget Mulligan’s haunted eyes. It’s a shame about the tidiness of the film’s wrap-up, but otherwise An Education earns its place at the head of the class.

Original review by: Peter Travers  Rolling Stone  -  Extracted by: Gill Ireland

Mild themes and coarse language

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New Zealand, 2009

Director: Leanne Pooley

Music: David Long (and the Topp Twins)

Featuring: The Topp twins Jools and Linda Topp, with John Clarke and others.

Running time: 84 minutes

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This documentary summarises the lives of the fifty year old Topp Twins, the world’s only comedic, country singing, dancing and yodelling, lesbian, twin sisters. From rural backwaters in New Zealand to busking on the streets of Auckland, to performances at the Rugby World Cup and London’s West End stage, their appeal seems limitless. The twins have morphed from radical activists into Kiwi ‘national treasures’ and ‘cultural ambassadors’. Jools and Linda Topp present one of those amazing true stories which make biographical documentaries so engaging. Irrepressible and fun loving, they have easily attracted audiences and built a following that continues to grow.

Director, Leanne Pooley, has put together a well paced and satisfyingly complete picture of the women and their lives. They don’t have careers; it’s what they do and who they are. There is plenty of their music, recorded live on stages around the world, intercut with interviews, including comedian and writer John Clarke, whose astute observations are a welcome addition to our own perceptions. The film covers a lot of ground as the Topps take to the streets against apartheid, nuclear weapons, supporting gay rights and civil liberties – and they also take their activism onto the stage. When their special, strongly united world is threatened by Jools’ cancer, we watch Linda provide extensive emotional support during these tough times. Watching the effects of the illness adds poignancy to hearing Jools’ request, once back on stage, that Linda sing – at every performance for the rest of their lives – her favourite song, My Pinto Pony and I.

The film won the first People’s Choice documentary award at the Toronto Film Festival, ahead of Michael Moore’s much admired Capitalism: A Love Story.

Original review by : Andrew L. Urban, Urban Cinefile

Extracted by: SC Patton

Strong violence, course language and mature themes

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France   2008

Director: Jean-Francois Richet

Featuring: Vincent Cassel, Cecile De France, Gerard Depardieu, Gilles Lellouche, Roy Dupuis, Elena Anaya, Florence Thomassin, Michel Duchaussoy                                                                                         Language: French with subtitles

Running Time: 133 mins

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Part one, of a double bio-pic. Part two will feature at a future screening.

This was 1979, the year in which Jacques Mesrine, a notorious French bank robber, murderer, media darling and compulsive self-publicist who revelled in his title of Public Enemy Number One, was cut down in a hail of bullets in Paris by a special hit squad of police who were not prosecuted for their extra-judicial wet job. The build-up to this slaying forms the opening scene to Jean-François Richet’s terrific film, though the sequence is presented in a tricksy split-screen manner, misleadingly hinting that the film will be in the wacky Anglo-Saxon style of The Italian Job or The Thomas Crown Affair. Instead, Mesrine is in the tradition of Jules Dassin’s Rififi or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge: muscular, forthright storytelling, hard-smoking, hard-drinking action, horribly incorrect attitudes, brutality with a top-note of self-loathing, bushy moustaches and a cracking lead performance from Vincent Cassel as Mesrine.

Based on the autobiography that Mesrine wrote and circulated in prison called Death Instinct; his memories may be self-serving and as Richet concedes in a statement before the film begins, the action can’t be considered gospel. And yet Mesrine emerges as so horrible and unsympathetic that much of it may be nothing more nor less than the truth.

Original review by: Peter Bradshaw – The Guardian.

Extracted by Ian Norton.

Strong coarse language and nudity; Strong sexual themes and sex scenes

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Australia 2009

Director: Rachel Ward

Featuring: Bryan Brown, Maeve Dermody, Rachel Griffiths, Ben Mendelsohn

Running Time: 101

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Confronting in its family drama, Beautiful Kate manages to simultaneously disturb and reward its audience with a strong, well rounded story and excellent performances.

As the commentariat whines about local films being too heavy, the uncomfortable and uncompromising Beautiful Kate – one of the finest Australian productions in recent years – gives the celluloid finger to the aforementioned whingers. “You think those other movies are bleak?” the filmmakers seem to be saying. “We’ll show you bleak.”

Beautiful Kate is about a family so dysfunctional that you need another word for it. Exquisitely shot in the Flinders Ranges, it follows Ned Kendall (Ben Mendelsohn), a forty-year-old writer who returns to his family’s remote property to see his dying father, the belligerent Bruce (Bryan Brown). Ned is eaten alive by guilt surrounding the teenage death of his twin sister, the titular Kate (Sophie Lowe), and his reappearance stirs skeletons and secrets in the Kendall’s airless closet.

Told partly in seamless flashbacks, Ned confronts his own disturbing past as he battles Bruce in the present. It’s so real that you can smell the stench of Bruce’s sick room, and the decaying property itself becomes a character – and a metaphor for Bruce’s failures.

When Bruce and Ned go head-to-head, you’re not just seeing two of Australia’s best actors give their all, but a father and son unbottling a lifetime’s worth of resentment and explosive rage.  With muscular direction from Rachel Ward (Brown’s real life wife), who adapted the screenplay from Newton Thornburg’s American-set novel – and enhanced by Tex Perkins’ and Murray Paterson’s score – this decidedly anti-popcorn movie does ultimately offer redemption and hope. It’s an intense, disquieting experience – but a deeply rewarding one.

Original review by Annette Basile – Filmink Australia.

Extracted by Owen Tilbury

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Italy/France 1963

Directed by:  Luchino Visconti

Adapted from the novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa’

Featuring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon

Language: Italian with subtitles

Running time: 180 minutes

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Exquisite from first frame to last, Viconti’s 1963 epic deals with the tensions, both internal and external, bearing down on a grand Sicilian clan in the late nineteenth century is one of the greatest cinematic sagas ever.

Burt Lancaster plays an Italian prince in the 1860s, who laments the passing of the old aristocratic order, symbolized by the marriage of his nephew to a merchants daughter.  The young people are the inheritors of the inevitable changes brought about to the land by Risorgimento of Garibaldi.  The film captures vividly the autumnal mood of change and decay that the onrush of revolution brought to one family, and to the spirits of one man in particular. There are a few scenes to the external politics, such as Garibaldi ’s conquests of Sicily, briefly depicted as a combat between the Red Shirts and Bourbons in Palermo’s narrow streets.

The great, gaudy end-of-an-era banquet takes up the last 40 minutes of the nearly three-hour saga. This detailed depiction of a ball is deservedly considered to be one of the most celebrated set pieces in film history.

The Leopard won the Cannes Grand Prix in 1963, but fell foul of Hollywood marketing forces. 20th Century-Fox butchered the film for distribution in Britain,the U.S and Australia. Crudely dubbed, with insensitive cuts, bleached colour and scaled down from a widescreen format; its director was furious. In the Sunday Times in October 1963, Visconti wrote “It is now a work for which I acknowledge no paternity at all”, and accused Hollywood of insulting Americans by treating them like “a public of children”. Now presented in its original version, this giant of world cinema is back in all its lavish glory.

Original review by: Emanuel Levy NY Times Additional information: Chapel Films

Extracted and compiled by Peter Gillard

Strong Course Language

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UK, 2009

Director: Armando Lannucci

Writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Lannucci & Tony Roche

Featuring: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee & James Gandolfini

Running Time: 106 Minutes

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Political satire is a bitch to pull off. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove set the bar high in 1964. But damned if In the Loop doesn’t at least nip at its skirts. Best of all, this ink-black comedy of war and how to stop worrying and love the spin is devilishly clever. The gifted British writer-director Armando Iannucci, whose BBC series The Thick of It is the spark for the film, keeps the dialogue coming fast and furiously funny.

The time is just before the invasion of Iraq. The governments of Britain and the U.S. are in a fever. On Downing Street — a spin on The Office (Ricky Gervais edition, complete with handheld cameras) — the PM’s caffeinated director of communications, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), is verbally abusing Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a twit minister who has just done interviews claiming support for the U.S. in a war that he declares “unforeseeable.” The brilliant Capaldi turns cursing into performance art, spewing streams of invective that would make David Mamet blush.

Somehow the idiot Simon winds up in D.C. with two handlers (Chris Addison and Gina McKee), who can’t stop him from inserting foot in mouth. Simon gets caught in the crossfire of a State Department hawk (David Rasche) and a dove of a general (a slyly hilarious James Gandolfini), with an ex-lover (a priceless Mimi Kennedy) in the diplomatic corps. The dangerous incompetence of these warring factions will strike you as more than familiar. That’s why the laughs stick in the throat. But laugh you will, loud and often. In the Loop deserves to be a sleeper hit. The whole cast is stellar. And it proves that smart and funny can exist in the same movie, even in summer.

Original review by: Peter Travers – Rolling Stone.

Extracted by: Kim Pridham.

Mountaineering deaths

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Germany/Austria/Switzerland, 2008

Director:: Philipp Stölz

Script: Christoph Silber, Philipp Stölzl, Rupert Henning, Johannes Naber

Featuring: Benno Fürmann, Florian Lukas, Johanna Wokalek, Georg Friedrich, Simon Schwarz, Ulrich Tukur, Erwin Steinhauser, Branko Samarovski, Petra Morzé.

Language: German with subtitles

Running time: 121 minutes

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A thrilling adventure about mountains, war and love, North Face grips us as tightly as the pitons that grip the precipitous edge of the Eiger. The story is based on true events in 1936, when pressure mounted for a German mountaineer to be the first to ascend the ‘Wall of Death’. The story has a bit of everything, but it is the conflict between man and nature that holds all the trumps.

“You can be the best but it’s still a lottery,” says mountain climber Toni Kurz, when talking to his climbing partner Andreas Hinterstoisser about the climb. Brought up in Berchtesgarden in Bavaria, theirs is a comfortable partnership as they conquer slopes where only eagles dare. We know from the very beginning of the film, when we meet Luise Fellner, a rookie photo journalist in the newsroom of Berlin’s daily newspaper, that she has more than a superficial interest in the two men.

The first part sets the scene, the historic context and the chemistry between Luise and Toni. It is not until we are on the mountain when we find the sun may shine for a minute, but then a deadly blizzard suddenly hits. After all, the legend tells of an Ogre (or Eiger) that lives in the mountain and ‘devours everyone who gets too close’. Come in a train; leave in a coffin, the locals say.

The contrast couldn’t be greater between the light hearted conversations by the onlookers at the comfortable hotel and the plight of the mountaineers facing enormous challenges. There’s an accident, a snowstorm, a selfless act and the unexpectedness that the elements deliver. Our hearts are in our mouths throughout the final hour as the story reaches its dramatic and climactic peak. But the success of the film lies in the culmination of the elements and Stölzl manages to chill us to the very core emotionally, as we become involved in nature’s drama.

Original review by Louise Keller Urbancinefile

Extracted by Peter Gillard

Mature Themes

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U.K. 2009

Directed and written by: Tom Ford

From the novel by Christopher Isherwood.

Featuring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore

Running Time: 100 minutes

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The fashion designer Tom Ford has branched out into directing with this film and with great initial success, because Colin Firth won Best Actor when the film screened last year at the Venice Film Festival and recently also won a BAFTA award.

Firth plays 52 year old George Falconer, a British professor teaching at a college in Los Angeles in 1962. George is gay and his partner of many years, played in flashback by Mathew Goode, was killed in a road was killed in an accident 8 months ago. George is in a state of deep grief.  He teaches a college class on Aldous Huxley (is he still taught?). He works in a subtext about those who do not conform. No student is interested, except Kenny who may be less interested in the lecture than the lecturer.

His only friendship is with Charley, a sad alcoholic of a certain age with whom he once, briefly, had a try at a heated affair. She gives him gin and sympathy, but it’s more ritual than comfort.  This was a time when being gay was not socially acceptable, when jobs could be lost, when families were shamed and therefore cruel. Ford has imbued this adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel with a compelling sense of beauty and style. It is an immaculate-looking film. If anything the sense of style in every frame is a bit overwhelming. But the heart of the film is in Firth’s performance, he is just splendid as a man whose calm, controlled exterior hides an inner world of pain. His sense of loss is palpable.

Original reviews: Margaret Pomeranz (ABC At the Movies) and Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times)

Extracted and compiled by: Gill Ireland