Stilgherrian » Film

Chocolate bunny revisited

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:00:11 +0000

Since it’s Easter Sunday, I’ll point you to a previous post showing what happens to unpopular bunnies. Enjoy!

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Everything is better on ice…

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:03:30 +0000

When I went to Thailand last year, Thai Airways International was generally excellent — except for their choice of in-flight movies. Sorry, but even after a couple glasses of wine and several brandies High School Musical is a piece of shit.

I’d originally guessed that it was only screened because it somehow matched the Thai sense of sentimentality. But no. I soon discovered it was such a success — it even won an Emmy! — that Disney made a sequel with the imaginative title High School Musical 2.

I was really, really hoping that was going to be the end of the story. But no (again). Touring Australia in April and May is… High School Musical: The Ice Tour.

Sadly, this show doesn’t involve the dentally-perfect racially-balanced lead characters in some meth-fuelled rampage but… yes… ice skates. Somebody get me a bucket.

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Some videos what you can enjoy, y’hear?

Stilgherrian — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:04:56 +0000

Here’s some moving images on the Internet for your enjoyment.

You know how Westpac bank ATMs have that woman who gestures at you through the transaction? Does she annoy you? I especially hate how she asks whether you want a receipt, and then says you can’t have a receipt. Ignorant bitch. What about this version?
Check out the most in-demand video editing crew in the entire Sunnyvale trailer park.
A currently-running TV advert with a nice beaver. I encourage you to join the conversation there about the use of the word. Has the advertiser got it right for the Australian audience?

Now this is nothing more than links to things I found interesting. Should this be a full post like this, with a headline? A “Note” which, on the website home page at least, is shown without a headline but with a red line in the margin? Or should I just Twitter them as I find them?

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Zombies in Plain English

Stilgherrian — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:27:48 +0000

The folks at Common Craft are worried about you and your brain at Halloween. That’s zombie season and they want you to be prepared. To help, they made this 3 minute video that will enure you survive, brain intact. Wacky Canadians. (Hat-tip to Peter Black, kinda.)

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Odd obituary for Heath Ledger

Stilgherrian — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:05:30 +0000

Who’d have thought? An obituary for Heath Ledger in Middle English! Well, for a character he played. Doffing the hat to Quatrefoil, who writes, “Whoever writes this blog is frequently side-splittingly funny, but he or she can write (and knows their Middle English passing well). I am filled with wonder and envy.”

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Film Review: “Joy Division”

Stilgherrian — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:02:14 +0000

Back when Triple J’s Hottest 100 voters could choose the best music of all time, not just the current year’s releases, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart won top spot for the first two years, 1989 and 1990. Certain floppy-haired boys played me this melancholy pop song endlessly late at night. It was good, sure, but that significant? Having seen Director Grant Gee’s new documentary Joy Division, I now know why. I really know.

This. Is. A. Magnificent. Film.

Just watch the trailer to get a taste.

Why?

Director Grant Gee reckons the story of Joy Division is the story of Manchester. The city invented the industrial revolution, but by the 1970s it had become a bleak concrete modernist blockhouse. As one band member says, “I was 9 years old before I saw a tree.” Thatcher loomed. Joy Division’s melancholic sound channelled the very essence of the city.
The selection and editing of archival footage is brilliant, starting with Joy Division’s truly dreadful Sex Pistols-inspired punk origins and their rise through Manchester’s underground music scene. He visits the locations of long-gone nightclubs and captions the shot of the current building “Things which aren’t there.”
We hear from virtually everyone: all the surviving band members, who you’d know as New Order; producers, designers, promoters and lead singer Ian Curtis’ Dutch journalist girlfriend — though not his widow, who appears only through her writings.

“Widow”?

Yes. If you don’t already know, you’ll discover that Joy Division’s story is also the tale of Ian Curtis’ self-destruction.

Most people assumed Curtis was off his face during his erratic, mesmerising performances, but no! He was literally in a trance, which as the pressure of stardom climbed eventually became full grand mal epilepsy. Blaming himself for holding back the band’s meteoric rise, he killed himself in May 1980.

Joy Division is a powerful story. Yes, I shed a tear at one point. But it’s also a masterpiece, preserving a vital slice of musical history.

Joy Division opens today at the Chauvel Cinema in Sydney, Cinema Nova in Melbourne and the Luna Leederville in Perth.

[Photo: Joy Division photographed in Hulme, Manchester, 6 January 1979 by Kevin Cummins. Cummins appears in the film Joy Division and talks about the photo shoot when this was taken.]

[Update 11am: You can also read ’Pong's review, if you like.]

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New Film & TV bookshop on King Street

Stilgherrian — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:58:55 +0000

Marcus Wade has opened the Film & Television Specialist Bookshop at 1/502 King Street, Newtown. Actually it opened in November but we only discovered it yesterday. Drop in, buy something, say “Hi” from us.

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Heath Ledger dead: jokes here please

Stilgherrian — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:58:55 +0000

Yes, Australian actor Heath Ledger is dead, possibly from a drug overdose. So now it’s time to collect all the jokes, ‘cos he can’t sue you for libel. Please add them in the comments.

Tasteless? Yes. Exploitative? Probably. Too soon for this? Yeah probably that too.

So why do it?

It’s an experiment…

More than a year after the event, a collection of jokes about Steve Irwin’s death is still one of the most heavily-visited pages on this website. More than half of the searches bringing people here are for Corey Worthington Delaney.

Tasteless is what you want, so tasteless is what you’ll get.

We’ll even throw in the phrases “heath ledger porn” and “heath ledger naked” to help things along. Index that, Google!

The comments will be moderated, but not heavily. They may take a while to show up because — oddly enough! — there are other things to do.

[Update: Scroll down to find the comments thingy. Try to spell properly. And if you're going to whinge that "It's too soon to make jokes," then at least suggest how long someone has to be dead before they're not sacred any more. And try to spell properly.]

[Update 27 January 2008: The two rules about relevance are now being enforced. Comments will not be published if (1) they repeat jokes which have already been posted, unless they're substantial improvements, or (2) they're just some anti-gay comment that doesn't have any relevance.]

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If there were only 100 people on Earth…

Stilgherrian — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:38:20 +0000

… it’d look like what’s depicted in this short film, The Miniature Earth.

The text is from the late Donella Meadows’ State of the Village Report from 1990 but the movie, now in its third edition, has updated statistics.

It isn’t very new. It’s already been seen by 675,828 people on YouTube since it was posted in September 2006. But I thought it’d be worth giving it a plug.

A great way to spend three and a half minutes, I reckon.

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How to kill a chocolate bunny

Stilgherrian — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:27:54 +0000

What can I say about this wonderful short film? It’s hauntingly beautiful, well photographed with excellent colour grading — and just a little bit creepy.

Hat tip to tiny gigantic.

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Shift Happens 2.0

Stilgherrian — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:49:40 +0000

The little infographic movie Shift Happens, which I wrote about in April, has been updated as Did You Know 2.0. There’s also a website to discuss the film and new versions.

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Film Review: “Lady Chatterley”

Stilgherrian — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:58:27 +0000

I don’t normally review films. But this isn’t so much a review of the new Lady Chatterley but a review of the audience.

The film is based on D H Lawrence’s 1927 book John Thomas and Lady Jane, the first and less-well-known version of the story which was re-written as the controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover and published in 1928.

Controversial? Oh yes! Explicit sex scenes, four-letter words, and perhaps the most scandalous aspect: the love affair was between an aristocratic woman and a gamekeeper. Crossing class boundaries! England shall fall! Read all about it.

Now you may think that society has changed since 1927. But no, our audience proved otherwise.

’Pong and I missed the first few minutes of this very long film: 161 minutes. The first shot we saw was Lady Chatterley walking down a corridor. A long corridor. Footstep after dreary footstep. With no dialogue. “Great,” I thought. “It’s one of those arty French films where Everything Is Extremely Meaningful.” But fortunately it settled down, and Pascale Ferran’s direction creates a beautiful environment in which the love affair unfolds.

If you want a proper review, you can read Margaret Pomeranz. She did find it tedious — but she’s also read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and thought it was a masterpiece. I hadn’t, so I came to this film as a film, not as a re-working of Great Literature.

What intrigued me was the sex — or more particularly the audience’s reaction to it.

The whole point of the story is that an aristocratic woman discovers passion by bonking the gamekeeper. All very shocking in the 1920s and the book was subject to an obscenity charge when eventually published in the UK in 1960.

Times have changed a bit since then. Indeed this film is only rated M. You see a half-erect penis for about a second, a couple of breasts, and naked bodies intertwined on the floor of the gamekeeper’s hut.

But there’s a scene where Lady Chatterley delights in running naked in the rain — enjoying the sheer physicality. The gamekeeper strips off and follows her, and they laugh and giggle like children again. “Oh dear,” I heard from tut-tutting audience members. The couple runs through the forest, trip and fall — still naked — and get covered in mud. Again the tut-tut from the audience.

In another scene, the lovers intertwine spring flowers in each other’s bodies — including a few little blooms artfully placed in the good Lady’s pubic hair. And the audience giggles like nervous schoolgirls.

Now I will admit that our preview screening was for members of the Dymocks Booklover Loyalty Program. So maybe there’s an over-representation of eastern suburbs housewives with dull, passionless sex lives. But surely running naked in the rain isn’t that out of the ordinary? Surely lovers playing silly little games after sex isn’t unknown to them? Or are they still trapped in a time warp, where “a lady” shouldn’t engage in such an unseemly display?

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Powers of Ten

Stilgherrian — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:09:49 +0000

If you’ve never seen the short film Powers of Ten, now is the time. OK, it’s from 1977, so our understanding of things at either end of the spectrum has changed. But it’s narrated by Morgan Freeman — and it’s way cool. As is The Simpsons version.

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Free Moby Music

Stilgherrian — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:32:32 +0000

New York DJ and producer Moby is giving away music. mobygratis.com is for “independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.” Nice.

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’Pong’s “Anywhere Chairs” online!

Stilgherrian — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:12:59 +0000

It’s done! ’Pong has completed his short film Anywhere Chairs, which he made as part of the Sydney Songlines project. You have to put up with my narration, I’m afraid.

(I wrote about this project when he started it and when I found myself discussing the motivations of a chair. I should have also written about how all-consuming it’s been for the last few weeks!)

Interesting Geekfacts: The whole film was shot on a Nokia N90, one of the first Nseries “multimedia” phones (2 megapixels from a Carl Zeiss pimple-lens). Post-production was in iMovie HD 6 and GarageBand 3. It was converted to Flash Video for the web using ffmpegx.