Metro -julkaisun No. 204 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

At the movies, we like to watch girls die. How else do we account for the success of the slasher flick in which girls die left and right, and the one who survives only does so thanks to her extraordinary ‘ungirlishness’: her primness, her bookishness, her resourcefulness, her inability to attract the sexual attention of functional (read: non-psychotic) men? Elsewhere, girls die to prompt the hero’s journey of a lover, brother or father; they die to be a lesson someone else learns; they die so that others might truly live. Girls in corsets cough into handkerchiefs and delicately expire; girls, uncorseted, are found livid and mottled, dead in the woods – stark images to haunt investigators already teeming with personal demons. Or girls simply vanish and, gone those girls, leave…

As Maziar Lahooti’s film Below (2019) opens, Dougie (Ryan Corr) is getting the bashing of a lifetime – and he’s grinning. The camera holds tight on Dougie as he smirks and cracks jokes while unseen thugs smash electronic equipment around him. He even tries to light a cigarette, though it’s punched out of his mouth in slow motion. Immediately, we sense this is a film about spectatorship: one that locates entertainment in the act of watching violence. Eventually, Dougie is left to explain to his mum, Cheryl (Alison Whyte), who owns the just-trashed house, that he owes money to some shady people. His professional milieu is the darknet – the online underworld below the World Wide Web, beyond the rule of law. There, he presents himself as an entrepreneur, an…

Australia’s independent videogames scene is globally unique: here, there is very little to be independent from. Most other game development hubs – places like Toronto, London, Kyoto, Seattle – have a ‘big end’ of town, where major companies provide both steady employment for a large body of workers and a kind of flat palate of establishment taste to rebel against. Australia had this once, in the form of companies with big international investment and contracts to fulfil. Then a mixture of local mismanagement and the global financial crisis meant that all but a few sold up, shut down and moved out.1 All that was left was independence. And so Australia’s videogames culture is now defined not by any kind of rebellion against the Man, but by gradations of independence –…

We Are Little Zombies (2019) is about a quartet of thirteen-year-old orphans who form a chiptune band. In turn, it’s like a chiptune movie. Katsuya Yamada’s score duly bleeps and blurps, while writer/director Makoto Nagahisa liberally employs a host of cutesy videogame imagery: 8-bit intertitles and title sequences; circle wipes; conversational references to ‘save points’ and ‘end-of-level bosses’; footage deliberately pixelated; characters shown in eye-of-god overheads that render them two-dimensional, Frogger- like figures shuffling through landscapes. Characters herein obsessively play an old handheld game – which shares the same name as the film, and inspires the name of the band within the film – and there’s an early scene of pure vintage-console fetishry. The movie proceeds in ‘stages’, many of which have specific goals; the names of these stages are…

STORYTELLING IN A TIME OF EVOLUTION: SCREEN FOREVER 2019 Rochelle Siemienowicz ‘There is really only one choice. You die with your ageing, white audience or you embrace diversity.’ That was the advice delivered by actor, writer, director and producer Rachel Griffiths in her 2019 Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture. She was speaking in Melbourne in November at the Screen Forever Conference, run by Screen Producers Australia (SPA). Griffiths arrived on the stage with some authority. She was, after all, the driving force behind the year’s highest-grossing Australian film, Ride Like a Girl, as well as being a co-creator of the acclaimed ABC political drama series Total Control. But knowing she was talking to a room full of producers – those creative businesspeople who put together deals, take risks and nurture stories…

Twenty minutes into Finke: There and Back (Dylan River, 2018), there’s a scene in which a mixture of competition officials, police and medical staff are all in a meeting, planning for the inevitable injuries that will happen as a result of the upcoming race. They talk through contingency plans in case of a death, and one medical worker points out that history has shown that there are roughly sixty extra presentations to the emergency department over the course of Finke weekend, with twenty of these being serious injuries. This is the reality of the Finke Desert Race, an epic journey that sees participants travel approximately 230 kilometres each way over the course of two days. The race first took place in 1976 and, originally, was pretty basic: a small group…

The most memorable moment in The King (2019) – David Michôd’s de-Shakespeared telling of the coming of age of Henry V of England – comes when a blonde-wigged Robert Pattinson, playing the Dauphin of France as a louche, ridiculous, devilish dandy, insults the titular monarch (played by Timothée Chalamet) for being brave yet non-threatening. After pledging to slay his counterpart and bury him on French soil, the Dauphin says, ‘You know your balls must be big, no? Giant balls! Giant balls with a tiny cock!’ before breaking down into stagy laughter. It’s part of a wacky turn that finds R-Patz – one-time teen pin-up, now champion of visionary auteurs – speaking in a French accent seemingly beamed in from a sketch-comedy show. ‘In ways that I fully 100% endorse and…

‘This is real life, not some cutesy fairytale,’ shouts a spurned lover in local indie rom-com Standing Up for Sunny (Steven Vidler, 2019). ‘You kiss a frog – in the morning, it’s still going to be a frog.’ Implausibly, the ‘frog’ in question is the film’s drop-dead gorgeous lead, Travis (RJ Mitte, of Breaking Bad fame). Uttered with venom to Sunny (Philippa Northeast) by the obligatory not-right-for-her boyfriend Mikey (Sam Reid), the line is just one of many bigoted slights about Travis’ cerebral palsy made by the ableist characters populating the film. Yet, in its specific allusion to fairytale endings, it is actually a line that speaks perfectly to disabled people’s complicated relationship with happily-ever-afters. The romance genre proselytises two separate, and somewhat conflicting, truths about love. The first is…

The motorsports biography has become an increasingly prevalent subgenre in antipodean documentary over the past few years, to the point that we can identify commonalities in the form beyond the obvious subject matter. Roger Donaldson’s McLaren (2017) recounted the life of New Zealand Formula One champion Bruce McLaren, while actor-turned-director Jeremy Sims made his first venture into documentary filmmaking with Wayne (2018), an effusive hagiography of Australian motorcycle-racing legend Wayne Gardner. Now comes Brabham (2019), from yet another actor-turned-director, Akos Armont. As the title suggests, Armont’s film retells the life story of Australian Formula One legend Sir John Arthur ‘Jack’ Brabham, whose most notable accomplishment (among many impressive deeds, it must be said) was becoming the first driver to win a Formula One world championship in a car he himself…

Some of the most exciting Chinese films of recent years have come in a noir-inflected vein: Jia Zhang-Ke’s triumphant Ash Is Purest White (2018) returned its director to a degree of global renown not seen since A Touch of Sin (2013), while Bi Gan’s ambitious Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) has had limited commercial outings in some Australian cities. Hot on the heels of these titles comes Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019), which enjoyed an Australian theatrical release late last year courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment following bows at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Brisbane International Film Festival and Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival. The film is Diao’s first since his breakthrough to international prominence: the Berlin Golden Bear–winning Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014). That film echoed both Memories…

Released in 2017, Pixar’s animated film Coco (Lee Unkrich) is a breathtakingly poignant and memorable experience, taking viewers on a splendid journey through the colourful and symbolic landscape of Mexico’s annual Day of the Dead1 festival. A story of a young boy who is desperately trying to follow his dream of becoming a musician despite being blocked by a deep, multigenerational family wound, Coco is a film about the importance of tradition, family and unity, and how inflexibility and an unwillingness to forgive can impede or even extinguish individuality and self-realisation. It is also about memory and the act of ritualised remembering, and how the latter is used to create bonds of enduring meaning; the film suggests that, by linking individuals to their ancestors, the Day of the Dead celebration…