Inhaltsverzeichnis für No. 186 in Metro

The Beaux Strategem Simon Godwin (Man and Superman) directs George Farquhar's wild comedy of love and cash. The 'Beaux': Mr Aimwell and Mr Archer, two charming, dissolute young men who have blown their fortunes in giddy London. Shamed and debt-ridden, they flee to provincial Lichfield. Their 'Stratagem': to marry for money. Lodged at the local inn, posing as master and servant, they encounter a teeming variety of human obstacles: a crooked landlord, a fearsome highwayman, a fervent French Count, a maid on the make, a drunken husband, a furious butler, a natural healer, and a strange, turbulent priest. LIMITED SEASON from October 10 Hamlet The fastest selling ticket in theatre history! Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) stars in the title role of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy: HAMLET. Directed…

All About E (2015) opens with a hectic club scene. Bright Spanish-inspired decor and costumes fill the screen, bodies gyrate as dance music booms, and our protagonist, E (played by newcomer Mandahla Rose), canoodles with a beautiful woman in a bathroom stall. From the film’s opening frames, director Louise Wadley delivers frivolity and, despite a number of gearshifts throughout, the fun fails to wane. E is a successful and in-demand Sydney DJ. She has a gaggle of fans, steady work, a bevy of beautiful women and a strictly enforced ‘no overnights’ pick-up policy. Decked out in a matador outfit for her Spanish-themed club performances, E appears to be in control as she tames and rules those around her. After a particularly big night of drinking, E and her flamboyant Irish…

What comprises a healthy, happy family? This question is central to Robert Chuter’s The Dream Children, which chronicles a same-sex couple’s difficulties in adopting a child. David Crewe examines the film in light of the history of (un)equal adoption rights in Australia, the notion of ‘queer cinema’ and the need to resonate with a broader, straighter audience. ‘[E]very film is political.’ So wrote Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni in their seminal Cahiers du Cinéma essay, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’.1 Any film, they contend – be it commercial, independent, mainstream or avant-garde – is born of both the overarching ideology in which it was created and the capitalist systems through which it was distributed. Queer films – or, at least, films centring on queer characters and themes – are especially political. They are products…

When George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road was released in May this year, few expected it to be the commercial and critical triumph that it went on to become. The film was in development for twelve years – facing problems finding a leading man (Mel Gibson having become too old and possibly too controversial), and with studio-level cold feet delaying production numerous times – and the commencement of principal photography in 2012 itself seemed a miracle. Even then, the tumultuous shoot, which saw the production move from Australia to Namibia due to uncommonly rainy weather at the originally intended location of Broken Hill, only reinforced the idea that Fury Road was another in a long line of ill-fated franchise revivals by veteran directors. As trailers started emerging, followed by press…

Last Cab to Darwin (Jeremy Sims, 2015) is that rare example of an Australian film that balances life-affirming entertainment, star power and complex critical ideas; it is a touching road movie that will appeal to a broad range of audiences. The film revolves around Rex (Michael Caton), a terminally ill taxi driver who sets off on a long journey to Darwin, where euthanasia is legal; in the process, he discovers that it is never too late to start living and loving. Caton, best known for his roles in The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) and Packed to the Rafters, plays the grumpy, bedraggled taxi driver with no family and no knowledge of the world outside his native Broken Hill – a name that itself resonates with damaged dreams. Rex does, however,…

When a certain, much-loved type of story becomes culturally iconic, it seems to undergo a process whereby the pressure applied to it swells alongside the significance attributed to it. There’s an added freight to becoming more broadly consequential: new resonances and hence new conflicts, a gravity and a burden that expand with the attachments of ever-increasing audiences. Timothy Conigrave’s posthumous memoir Holding the Man is a story that’s been in the midst of such a swelling ever since it was published in 1995, not long after Conigrave died from AIDS-related illness. Now widely considered ‘one of the great love stories’,1 ‘essential queer reading’, ‘monumentally loved’ and ‘an Australian classic’,2 it has been reprinted fifteen times as well as adapted for the stage and, now, for the screen. The play, written…

This year, Priscilla is turning twenty-one and, like most on the verge of adulthood, she has put on a party frock, has done her hair and is ready to celebrate. But the monumental success of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) is being celebrated, not with a tacky birthday party featuring jelly shots and a suspicious bowl of punch, but rather with an all-new ABC documentary that details the extraordinary story of how this radical film was born out of the tragedy of hate, discrimination and deadly silence. Looking back, it may seem like the success of Priscilla was guaranteed from its inception. Yet, as Between a Frock and a Hard Place (Paul Clarke & Alex Barry, 2015) reveals, Elliott’s film was brought into the…

‘Queer cinema’ has become a familiar label or branding device to identify films that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender narratives or themes. This is both a good and a bad thing; while queer films are undoubtedly reaching a wider audience than ever before, an awareness of a ready-made ‘niche’ audience has facilitated the dilution of queer representation and encouraged a tendency towards more conventional ‘mainstream’ storytelling. The political imperatives serviced by, for example, what queer theorist B Ruby Rich termed the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s – which responded to anxieties surrounding the AIDS epidemic – have been displaced by a more upbeat, inclusive framework that regularly takes in the tropes of self-discovery, love and social acceptance. This change of focus and tone chimes with a shift…

Comedian Carl Barron’s big-screen debut is perhaps different from what his devoted audience might have expected, considering his previous work. He and Manny Lewis (2015) co-writer Anthony Mir, who directed the film, began their careers as stand-up comedians, yet the film is not a laugh-out-loud comedy, nor is it as wacky and colourful as Mir’s 2003 You Can’t Stop the Murders. It’s a gentle, bittersweet narrative that tackles some dark, personal material – akin to Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) or even Limelight (Charlie Chaplin, 1952), both highly reflective comedy-dramas starring two brilliant comedians, Peter Sellers and Chaplin, respectively. Indeed, there’s a sense of melancholy that lingers throughout the entirety of Manny Lewis. I spoke to Mir and lead actress Leeanna Walsman about these and other aspects of the film.…

One of the big drawcards of the inaugural Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival (BAPFF) was its presentation of Crossroads of Youth; directed by Ahn Jong-hwa in 1934, it is Korea’s oldest surviving film1 and only surviving silent film.2 BAPFF’s two screenings were met with sufficient fanfare to make each feel like an event. The entrance to the Cinémathèque at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) was filled with eager volunteers handing out posters and traditional Korean candy, and the screening itself was accompanied by both the (subtitled) narration of Cho Hee-bong and live musical performers. According to the BAPFF website, everything about the staging suggested the intent to create a ‘wonderful opportunity to experience film just as Korean audiences did when Crossroads of Youth premiered in…

Visions of majestic snow-capped mountains, crampons and hikers evoke the atmosphere of the adventure documentary that follows the bold explorer conquering Everest, or Mother Nature, or his demons (and it usually is his, not her). Jennifer Peedom’s Sherpa – which premiered at the 2015 Sydney Film Festival and went on to screen at the Melbourne, Adelaide, New Zealand and Toronto film festivals – is not one of those films. Instead, it focuses the lens on the behind-the-scenes supporters of those expeditions, the titular Sherpas. The narrative of the mighty adventurer is perhaps diluted by our recognition that there are teams of people who put in a phenomenal amount of work to make such expeditions happen, so those people’s stories often end up on the cutting-room floor or, at most, as…

Skin Deep (Jon Leahy, 2014) celebrates the unlikely friendship between two young women who careen through the Sydney suburb of Newtown in this last-night-on-Earth vignette. The film follows Caitlin (played by screenwriter Monica Zanetti) and Leah (Zara Zoe) from meet-cute through to morning after – but, as a narrative, it shakes off the expectations of multiple genres. A fiercely character-driven tale, Skin Deep’s triumph is its rich, optimistic portrait of female friendship and youth. Impulsive Caitlin is a Newtown local and an emergency-room regular – a twentysomething with sweet-but-distant parents apparently oblivious to the signs of self-harm. Leah is a sheltered out-of-towner, visiting the hip inner-city suburb to see a natural therapist. The two women meet in a record store, argue over a CD and part ways. But when Caitlin…

The disconnect between the time and setting of the story and the time and place of the production gives the film a tone that is hard to pin down: it recalls various periods, styles and places, without locking onto any of them. As Slow West (John Maclean, 2015) treads towards its final credits, there is a slow montage of violent ends. A shot of each body killed during the film appears, one after the other: limbs thrown and frozen in flight, feet askew. The only sound is of faintly rushing wind. Then follows a shot of a cottage in an ochre field, linen fluttering in the breeze, horse grazing, clouds light overhead. In the cottage, a family is making a home. This peaceful domestic set-up has been foreseen, and it…

The Chinese film industry is set to overtake Hollywood as the world’s largest domestic box office by the end of this decade.1 This expansion has demanded rapid change and adaptation in the country as an emergent popular-cinema culture develops. An influx of young and established Hong Kong filmmakers is leading the charge, with co-productions and gun-for-hire approaches now the norm as working film-production models in China.2 The pillars of any popular cinema are its heroic figures, and, for the past fifty years, the Hong Kong film industry has been the source of these characters for Chinese audiences both on the mainland and abroad. From Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) to John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), Hong Kong filmmakers have encapsulated the preoccupations of their audiences in the heroes…

Director Fred Schepisi has gone on to an international career, with credits including the likes of Plenty (1985, UK/US), Six Degrees of Separation (1993, US) and the beautiful, elegiac Last Orders (2001, UK), as well as such notable local productions as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Evil Angels (1988). None of this success should seem surprising when one reconsiders his first feature, The Devil’s Playground (1976), made at the time when the Australian film industry was engaged in a major revival. Even among the triumphs of those heady days, The Devil’s Playground stands high for its combination of tough-mindedness and sensitivity in dealing with youth’s constraint by an oppressive system. Equally, it resists becoming a mere polemic, and its case is the stronger for this. Brian McFarlane, Series…

In Australia, there is a widespread perception that cinema ticket prices are too high.1 This view coincides with the observation that cinema attendance is losing ground as the dominant form of movie viewer-ship, and occurs at a time when film distribution itself is undergoing a profound transformation. This article considers the cost of going to the cinema in Australia within this broader economic and industrial context. While the evidence supports the view that, on average, it is becoming more expensive for Australians to enjoy a night out at the movies, this finding raises further questions: How is the rising price of cinema tickets in Australia affecting audience behaviours and preferences? And what are the implications of high ticket prices on exhibitors’ strategic decision-making and the performance of their cinemas? To…