German Film Festival on April 19 – 25th – “Das System” looks like it’s worth watching – watch 4 film trailers
The German Film Festival is on in Brisbane from Thursday the 19th to Wednesday the 25th of April. I’ve had a look through the program and picked out some of the films I’d like to see – but there’s plenty more, so make sure you check out the entire program.
Hell
Hell is set in the future where society has collapsed, there’s almost no water and people will do anything to survive. Click the “CC” button on the video above for English subtitles.
Sleeping Sickness
Sleeping Sickness is about a German doctor treating disease in Cameroon – but it’s not really certain how much good he’s doing.
The Fräulein and the Sandman
The Fräulein and the Sandman is a comic fantasy about a man who is slowly turning into sand.
The System
The System is about a young, petty and not-very-competent thief who botches a job and stumbles into a new world. Just because the East German dictatorship fell over twenty years ago, that doesn’t mean the men who worked for its secret police have gone away – they are still around, still evil and still running as much of Germany as they can get away with. I couldn’t find a trailer with English subtitles but this film looks interesting enough that I wanted to post the German version. (The film will have subtitles at the Festival).
Tickets for all films are $18 for adults, and $14.50 concession, or you can get a five-film pass for $75. There are more details about prices and booking tickets here at the Festival website. Most films are for people 18 years and older only, except for a few family films.
All films will be on at the Palace Centro cinema in James St, New Farm – see below for a map and public transport details. Click on the map for a much bigger version.
The best way to get to the Palace Centro by public transport is to either catch a CityGlider bus to Stop 229 on Wickham St in Fortitude Valley, (just after the corner of Brunswick St), or to catch a train to Fortitude Valley railway station, and walk to the cinema.
“Who Took The Bomp? Le Tigre On Tour” showing at Brisbane Underground Film Festival, 7pm Thu Oct 13, Powerhouse
When feminist electroclash musicians Le Tigre toured the world in 2004-2005, documentary maker Kerthy Fix followed them and made “Who Took The Bomp? Le Tigre On Tour“.
The film will be screening at the Brisbane Underground Film Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse at 7pm on Thursday October 13, 2011. Tickets are $16 for adults and $13 for concession, but you have to be over 18 to go. And let’s pause for a quick tip of the hat to the Brisbane or Death blog, where I found out about BUFF.
Click here for a map showing the best ways to get to the Brisbane Powerhouse by public transport.
“Shut Up Little Man!” – A Film About Neighbourly Abuse, at the Brisbane Underground Film Festival This Saturday
“Shut Up, Little Man!” sounds pretty weird, although after some of the places I’ve lived in, fairly run-of-the-mill, too. It’s a documentary about the success of the “Shut Up, Little Man!” audio recordings. The recordings got made when two young guys moved into an apartment in San Francisco and got forced to listen to constant arguments between two of their neighbours.
This YouTube video was made using recordings of one of the conversations
And this video is the trailer for the film that’s on at BUFF
The film screens at the Brisbane Underground Film Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse at 7pm on Saturday October 15, 2011. Tickets are $16 for adults and $13 for concession, but you have to be over 18 to go. And thanks to the Brisbane or Death blog, where I found out about BUFF.
Click here for a map showing the best ways to get to the Brisbane Powerhouse by public transport.
Review – Brighton Rock
I saw the new version of Brighton Rock last night at the Palace cinema in James St in Fortitude Valley, so I thought I’d do a quick review of the film. Warning – WARNING: AHEAD THERE BE HUGE SPOILERS!!
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The film is based on a novel by Graham Greene, which I haven’t read yet. It opens violently and gloomily; within the first ten minutes or so we see a nasty knife fight and a man getting his head smashed in with a rock. The smasher is the main character, Pinky Brown (Sam Riley), and this murder drags his life towards final judgement. He carries the weak-willed Rose (Andrea Riseborough) with him; she saw the murdered man with Riley’s accomplices minutes before the crime, and Pinky becomes her boyfriend and husband just to make sure she says nothing about it.
Ida (Helen Mirren), a friend of the murdered man, wants to make sure his killer is punished. She approaches Mr Colleoni (Andy Serkis) for help. Colleoni is a gangster who has taken control of Brighton’s protection rackets away from the gang Pinky is a junior member of, and which he is ambitious to lead. Pinky tries to set up a deal with Colleoni to kill Spicer (Phil Davis), the leader of his own gang who’s going to seed and threatens to talk about the murder. Colleoni, however, double-crosses Pinky and tries to have him killed as well. Colleoni’s men fail to kill either of their intended victims and Pinky has to finish the job, choking Spicer to death.
From here the gloomy film centres on Pinky and Rose’s relationship, if it can be called that. Rose is helplessly in love with the dominant Pinky, telling him she’ll never ever ever let him down. He uses her carefully, yet he hates her.
The morality of the Catholic Church hangs over the film. Early on Pinky sees a religious pendant Rose is wearing and tells her that he, like her, is a “Roman”. He believes firmly in Hell. To him Hell is no metaphysical copout meaning the absence of God, but a real place where sinners are punished in blistering fire for ever. Pinky is already on the way there; we’re constantly reminded he faces the threat of judgement in this world and the next. As he does evil things to avoid this world’s judgment, he drives himself closer to the death which will send him, he fervently believes, to the Devil.
Rose also believes in Hell and punishment, but her path is submission, to both God and men. What makes the film truly hateful to me is that in the end it seems to justify this. A scratch in a record allows her to believe that Pinky loved her, when we know he was disgusted by everything she does and is. As she lies in bed, pregnant with Pinky’s child, believing a lie that can only lead to yet more submission, the camera pans up to a cross on the wall. I suspect we are meant to think that the lie is a merciful miracle that will allow her to carry on. And if you believe, as the more reactionary and old-fashioned Catholics do, that any human effort at all is vanity and the only worthwhile thing is submission to God’s will, then what else could you possibly conclude?
If you agree with me, you should see this film so you can wrestle with its implications. It’s easy enough and childish enough to mock Christians for believing in a God whose existence science cannot prove, but someone who truly wants human freedom will move beyond sneering and think hard about how and why people can be led into a life of fearful obedience rather than struggling to be what they might.
Brighton Rock opens in Brisbane cinemas today, Thursday April 14 2011
Brisbane’s Queer Film Festival begins Fri Apr 8 2011
The Brisbane Queer Film Festival 2011 begins on Friday April 8.
Some of the films that look interesting are:
Spork is showing on opening night of the festival. It’s about a hermaphrodite dealing with the daily trauma of not fitting in at school, who takes on her bullies by…er…entering the talent show.
The Real Anne Lister is a documentary based on the diaries of Lister, who openly lived as a lesbian in Yorkshire almost 200 years ago. Her diaries describe her loves, and also her other interests as a well-off landowner.
Sistagirl is another documentary about Bindi Cole working on her Sistagirls project when she took photographs of transgendered women in the Tiwi Islands. The photographs are also on display at the Powerhouse from April 5 until May 29.
Christopher And His Kind is a screen adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s autobiography talking about his life as he leaves England for the excitement of the gay scene in Berlin in the 1930s.
There are also collections of short films, including Boys International Shorts and Girls International Shorts.
To see the full program visit the BQFF website. Individual films are $16 full price and $14 concession (except for opening night), and there are packages of films available too. You can book online at the Powerhouse’s website, or call the Powerhouse on 07 3358 8600 with your credit card details. All the films at the festival are rated R18+ so you might need to show ID proving you’re 18 or over when you pick up your tickets.
All the films are at the Brisbane Powerhouse in New Farm Park – click here for a Google Map with public transport details.
Brisbanites needed for documentary about video game censorship system
A Brisbane documentary team is making a short film about Australia’s censorship system for video games, and they need your help. The documentary is focussing on the current push for an R18+ rating for video games. At the moment, the highest rating a video game can have is M15+, meaning a game that is rated higher than that simply can’t be sold legally in Australia. That’s why games like Manhunt and Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure aren’t available legally here.
Filming will be in April, and they need shots of people from a whole range of ages playing video games (“from 8 to 80″). They’re also looking for:
People and companies who make and sell video games
People who are part of the Australian Classification Board
Academics who’ve done research into the effects of violent and/or sexualised video games
Organisations who are taking a stand on the R18+ rating issue (both for and against)
The best way to get in touch with the film-makers is to drop a line to Glenn Wauchop on Twitter – his username is @GlennChop. If you’re not on Twitter, you can email glennchop@gmail.com
Brisbane Queer Film Festival – Powerhouse Arts Centre, New Farm, Fri Apr 9 – Sun Apr 18 2010
Some of the films that look interesting include:
Drool – a woman accidentaly kills her abusive husband, so she puts him in the boot of her car and sets off with her best friend
Eyes Wide Open – Aaron, who lives in an ultra-religious community in Israel, falls in love with Ezri, a young man
The Big Gay Musical – Two young gay musical theatre actors work out how they think they should live their lives
(Although the idea of gay men in musical theatre doesn’t sound very believable)
Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar
Hannah Free: Two women in the USA’s Midwest maintain a lifelong love affair
Training Rules – documentary about how homophobia damages female athletes in college sports in the USA
For the full program of films, click here.
Tickets are $16 for a single film, or $14 concession. For details about tickets including triple-film deals, pre-selected packs of films and the opening night party, click here, and to book tickets online click here. All films at the festival are rated R and you might well need to show photo ID when picking up your tickets.
The Brisbane Queer Film Festival is on at the Brisbane Powerhouse, Lamington St, New Farm – click here for a Google Map including public transport details. To look up public transport routes and timetables, click here for the Translink journey planner.
Review of Kick-Ass, thanks to @newsunlimited – SPOILERS AHOY
The film is about a young New York man, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) , who decides he wants to be a costumed superhero, not because of any great trauma or earth-shattering event in his life, but just because it’s so mundane. The most exciting thing that happens to him is getting mugged every now and again by local hoods, but even that’s hardly an adrenaline rush, it’s just one of the tedious things he has to put up with.
So Dave buys a green wetsuit with a matching neoprene mask and becomes Kick-Ass. After a few weeks training, he encounters the same hoods who routinely mug him trying to break into a car, ducks into an alley to change into his costume and confronts them. He ends up getting stabbed in the belly and takes a vicious kicking. While in an ambulance he persuades the paramedic to get rid of his costume so no-one will know why he was beaten, which means he is brought naked to the hospital. This leads to a rumour spreading around his school that he was beaten after a gay encounter went wrong, which means Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca), who’s ignored him up to now, starts paying him attention as she’s always wanted a gay best friend. This is, presumably, the fault of Will and Grace.
X continues to patrol the streets as Kick-Ass, and when he takes on three hoods fighting one man he’s recorded by spectators on their moble phones, and becomes a celebrity when the footage is uploaded to YouTube. He starts a MySpace page (why MySpace? The comic was first published in 2008, when MySpace was already in decline, and the film doesn’t appear to have any connection to News Corporation, MySpace’s owner) for Kick-Ass, and when he learns that y is being harassed by a client of the needle exchange she volunteers at, he tells her to contact Kick-Ass for help. As Kick-Ass, he goes to the client’s home to tell him to back off, and is almost killed when he is saved by Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage), a father-and-daughter team of costumed heroes who have some serious fighting skills and a ridiculously large arsenal of weapons.
Big Daddy has been beating up the soldiers and and stealing the drugs of crime kingpin Frank d’Amico (Mark Strong), but when D’Amico’s minions tell him that drugs were stolen by a man in a mask and cape, he assumes they are lying and has them killed. When D’Amico realises that there really are costumed heroes after him, he assumes Kick-Ass is the real danger, as Big Daddy, an ex-cop named Macready who D’Amico had framed as a drug dealer after Macready refused to be corrupted, has carefully stayed hidden up till now.
In a seriously psychologically unsatisfying scene Dave and Katie become lovers, AFTER Dave (dressed as Kick-Ass) breaks into Katie’s room at night, frightens the hell out of her and then admits he’s been lying about being gay so Katie would pay attention to him. Maybe this is meant to show that Katie likes abusive relationships, after all she also befriended the client at the needle exchange and gave him money (and continues to be allowed to volunteer there? OK, it’s a film based on a comic, not a documentary, but still…)
Meanwhile D’Amico’s son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) poses as Red Mist, another costumed hero, to try and lure Kick-Ass into a position where he can be captured, in an attempt to win his father’s approval. He makes contact with Kick-Ass but before the ambush can be sprung, Big Daddy destroys the lumber mill which is the front for the drug operations, enraging D’Amico. A hidden camera Chris hid in the mill reveals Big Daddy to be the real threat, and Chris remembers that Kick-Ass mentioned the existence of other costumed heroes, and uses Kick-Ass to lead his father’s soldiers to Big Daddy. This sets up the final battles in the movie.
The movies was fun enough, with lots of well-done, slick action, and it had the audience laughing. A few people walked out – Hit Girl is only “eleven” according to one character, and she has some pretty foul language, including calling some of the bad guys “cunts” as she kills them. Her character is an incredibly dangerous fighter, and her weird relationship with her father is quite endearing, if utterly traumatising for a young child. As one character points out, she has no real childhood – her whole life with her father is training to kill very effectively. Naturally, Nicolas Cage plays the fairly creepy yet doting and protective parent quite well.
I wonder if anyone paying attention to racial issues in the USA has had anything to say about this movie. Most of the evil characters were either Italian or African-American, and only one African-American character was unequivocally a good guy (Omari Hardwick as Marcus), and he had barely any screen time. I first really noticed this in the scene where Kick-Ass gets saved by Hit Girl and Big Daddy in the junkies’ house – all the enemies there are African-American. This makes me wonder if the movie isn’t just another story about scary black people (and Italian Mafia) being kept in their place by good white people, with a few “good blacks” thrown in for good measure. The corrupt police officer who was in D’Amico’s pocket also had an Italian name.
Another thing I found a little tedious were the obvious references to other comic books, films and so on. Ok, ok, we get it. It was quite witty when The Simpsons started referencing other works, but that was twenty years ago, and these days I find it a little tedious. Since I’d never even heard of the comic book until yesterday, and since I’m not very big into comics anyway, I assume I missed out on plenty of stuff that fans of the comic would have picked up. Dave’s fear of being thought of as gay and the jokes around that theme were a bit annoying too, but I guess that’s fairly true-to-life.
And lastly, a word about a rather irritating habit that seems to be spreading at review screenings – we had to stand in a great big line and hand in our phones and iPods. This is presumably so I couldn’t take a nasty, grainy, small video of the film with horrible muddy sound, which you would watch in preference to seeing the film on a screen twenty feet tall with surround sound. I guess since I didn’t pay cash to see the movie I can’t complain too much (but then, they’re getting free publicity out of me from this review). But it was annoying, and I really doubt that the most popular illegal downloads are from people sneaking in video cameras. Most of the downloads I’ve seen were direct rips from the DVD or, possibly, directly from digital copies distributed by the maker. Taking mobile phones off people strikes me as being as effective as arresting street-level drug dealers while the kingpins are protected by their money and power. Also, it meant I couldn’t tell Twitter that I was waiting for the movie to start. Oh well, if you don’t want free publicity guys….
Anyway that’s my review. The film opens in Australia on Thursday April 8.
Brisbane French Film Festival – Wed March 17 to Wed March 21
The full list of films is here, and the list of session times and full ticketing information is here.
Below I’ve mentioned a few of the films that caught my eye. I couldn’t find trailers with subtitles for some of these, but all the films in the festival are being shown with English subtitles.
Skirt Day (La Journée de la jupe): A teacher facing a violent class accidentally holds them hostage – Official Site – French Film Festival page
Skirt Day is on at the Barracks cinema at 9pm on Friday March 26, and at 1.30pm on Sunday March 28.
Anything for Her (Pour Elle) – Lisa is arrested one morning for murder, which seems to make no sense at all. Her husbane Julien is unwilling to deal with uncaring bureaucrats, so he comes up with a dangerous plan – French Film Festival Site
Anything For Her screens at the Centro Cinema at 6.45pm on Friday March 19, and the Barracks Cinema 3.45pm on Sunday March 21
The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants) – A man’s life and finances collapse, and his family have to deal with it – French Film Festival Page
The Father of My Children is at the Centro Cinema at 6.45pm on Saturday March 20, the Barracks Cinema at 6.30pm on Friday March 26, and the Barracks Cinema at 7pm on Saturday March 27.
LOL – A girl breaks up with her boyfriend who cheats on her, while her mother starts seeing her divorced father again – French Film Festival Page
LOL is on at the Barracks cinema at 8.45pm on Saturday March 20, the Centro Cinema at 8.45pm on Friday March 26, and the Centro Cinema on Monday March 29 at 9.15pm
Legal Aid (Commis d’office) – A young lawyer is hired by an older, more worldly one, for reasons that turn out to be not so noble – French Film Festival Site
Legal Aid screens at the Centro Cinema at 6.45pm on Thursday March 18, and at the Barracks Cinema at 2pm on Sunday March 21
Lucky Luke – a purehearted gunslinger who won’t kill tries to take back an Old West town from the gang who now rules it. Based on the famous comic by Morris and Goscinny – Official Site – French Film Festival Site
Lucky Luke will be on at the Barracks Cinema at 7pm on Friday March 26, at the Centro Cinema at 4.45pm on Saturday March 27 and the Barracks Cinema at 3.30pm on Sunday March 28.
Neuilly Yo Mama! (Neuilly sa mère) A young man living in West Philadelphia a working-class housing estate in Châlon is forced to move in with relatives to rich Bel-Air Neuilly – French Film Festival Page
Neuilly Yo Mama is showing at the Barracks Cinema at 6.45pm on Friday March 19 and at the Centro Cinema at 4.45pm on Saturday March 20.
Tickets to the films are $16 for adults, and $14 for people 60 years or over, pensioners or full-time students. Children under 15 years get into G and PG-rated films for $12. Most of the films are restricted to people over 15 years, so check before planning to take people under that age. You can buy tickets online if you click here.
Brisbane Films – David Bowie and Led Zeppelin films at the Globe – FREE for @4zzz subscribers
On Thursday March 4th 2010 there’s a marathon of 4 different concert films of Led Zeppelin, starting at 7pm and going through to around midnight. The 4 concerts are:
The Royal Albert Hall, London, 1970
Madison Square Garden, New York City, 1973
It’s $11.50 to get into the 4-concert marathon, but it’s FREE if you’re a subscriber to 4ZZZ-FM or a member of Odyssey. Entry is for people aged 18 and over only, so you’ll need to bring photo ID. You can pay at the door, or you can buy tickets online here.
On Sunday March 7 2010 there’s a David Bowie double feature. At 4pm you can see Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars:
followed by Labyrinth:
It’s the same deal with tickets – $11.50, FREE for 4ZZZ-FM subscribers and Odyssey members. 18+, photo ID needed. You can buy tickets online here.
And then after the David Bowie double feature, the Led Zeppelin 4-film marathon is on again from 8pm till after midnight on Sunday March 7. And once again it’s FREE for 4ZZZ-FM subscribers and Odyssey members, or $11.50 for others – buy tickets online here.
The Globe Theatre is at 220 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, right near the Fortitude Valley train station – click here for a Google Map. Public transport details are on the map – click here to use the Translink journey planner to find out route and timetable details.