As a portrait of David Foster Wallace, The End of the Tour is mostly a failure. Along with Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), we follow Wallace’s 1996 promotion tour for Infinite Jest, but we learn less about him from the film than we could divine from reading his justly-celebrated novels and essays. Jason…
The nature of romantic comedy has changed in the past 20 years. Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman – these movies provided a fairytale aspect to the idea of romance: Prince Charming, the one person made for you. Nowadays, a hyper-realistic brand of rom-com has sprung up, grounded less in idealised perfect moments and more in…
Romantic comedies, as a rule, tend to get a bad rap. About half the time it’s deserved, as cliché follows cliché while subpar acting combines with flimsy plot development. (Doesn’t mean I don’t love them.) Learning to Drive, however, strays as far from this stereotype as possible while still falling under the rom-com umbrella. In the…
Not long after M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense opened in 1999, my parents dragged my brother along to the theatre to watch it because “we had to see it.” They’d seen it already, of course, and I suspect their second visit was as much motivated by analysing the construction of the film’s famous twist as…
“What was your point?” “Nothing. It’s just a funny story.” Your typical creature feature suffers from the ‘fireworks factory’ effect: the cumulative expectations of violence, horror and – of course – the appearance of the creature in question building into frustration and, often, disappointment. Spring, on the other hand, had me wondering if I’d put…
Opening your tragic love story with a re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet is a bold move, but it’s the kind of decision that neatly encapsulates the strengths – and weaknesses – of Holding the Man, Neil Armfield and Tommy Murphy’s film adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir. This is a film that unashamedly tilts for the…
Meryl Streep adds ‘Righteous-Rock-Chick’ to her resume in this breezy dramedy by Jonathan Demme. A musical masterpiece this is not. But it does offer a meaty slice of familial tribulation as the eponymous Ricki Rendazzo (Streep) attempts to reconnect with resentful offspring following self-imposed exile. Streep, the consummate pro, is clearly having a good time…
The Gift opens on ominous shots of an abandoned, modernist mansion, grey stone and brown wood gleaming dully in the afternoon L.A. sun. Soon, Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall), a professional couple from Chicago, will be escorted through the hollow house by a real estate agent. But for now it lies dormant, the…
The Andes are thick with fog, its white all-encompassing tendrils consuming the conquistadors descending into its depths. Even as it clears, revealing the pale blue sky above a mottled green canopy and rotten brown rivers, the atmosphere of portentous doom remains. Only Aguirre, “the wrath of God” (Klaus Kinski) seems immune to the heavy weight…
Over at FilmInk I reviewed three films from the upcoming Korean Film Festival in Australia: the entirely decent comedy-action-thriller A Hard Day; the surprisingly spiky rom-com-that-isn’t, My Ordinary Love Story and the epic boats-on-boats war film The Admiral: Roaring Currents (also out on DVD and Blu-Ray). My Ordinary Love Story is definitely the pick of…
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