News: Top Ten Movies of 2009 - #10

If there’s one thing movie geeks love to do it is to create lists. Everyone’s doing them. Top ten of the year. Top ten of the decade. Top ten blockbusters with the worst CGI. It’s completely perfunctory of course, and ranking them is, especially, absurd. But it satisfies our natural human instinct to ensure everything is categorized and easily referenced. With that spirit in mind, I will be revealing my Top Ten Films of 2009, in order, each weekday, beginning now with J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek.

10. Star Trek

Kirk and Spock on the iBridge

From the outset of 2009, Star Trek as a film series, and as a TV franchise, was dead. The last two films (Insurrection and Nemesis) were awful, and Enterprise was a valiant, but failed attempt to make hip a property widely known for the opposite. Leave it to J.J. Abrams, the skilful TV auteur behind Alias and Lost, Mi:III and, in concept at least, Cloverfield, to achieve just what Enterprise failed to do: make Star Trek cool again.

Hardcore fans may be upset that Abrams has fashioned Trek into an action-driven space-opera more akin to its fanboy rival, Star Wars. I am not, nor have ever been a serious Trek fan, my familiarity with series extending no further than many: First Contact, The Wrath of Khan and the odd episode of TNG or DS9. In other words, precisely the audience at which the 2009 revisioning takes aim.

With a gleeful energy and abundance of lens flares, this new Trek seamlessly blends thrilling action with a well drawn Spock/Kirk origin story. After Abrams, it is a success is largely because of its cast, especially Chris Pine as Kirk, paying homage to Shatner but making it his own, and Zachary Quinto, a surprisingly good Spock given his bland work as Sylar on the troubled Heroes.

The screenplay (by blockbuster go-to team Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) has its contrivances, but it’s also deft at establishing over a half dozen characters, and doing so with clever nods to the original series. Star Trek is not a great film, but it’s an exciting and polished refashioning of a beloved property, and that’s why it’s my tenth best film of the year.

Review: Brothers (2009)

Released March 18, 2010

The bad brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) and good wife (Natalie Portman) in Brothers

This remake of the Susanne Bier’s critically acclaimed drama has little new to say about the effect of war on its participants. What it does have are three strong performances from big Hollywood stars and a smattering of raw, emotional truth.

Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is a solider about to embark on another tour of Afghanistan, leaving behind his loving wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and their two daughters. Sam is the favoured and high-achieving son of the grouchy Hank (Sam Shepard), an alcoholic Vietnam-vet who would prefer to ignore the existence of his other trouble-making son, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Sam heads off to war but is quickly captured. His family presumes him dead –but of course, he’s not – and when he eventually returns, psychologically damaged from his ordeal, he resents the tight family unit that has formed in his absence.

The second half of Brothers is an emotional sucker punch, with a series of powerful yet oddly manufactured scenes. While tapping into a timely problem facing many military families, the characters feel more like movie creations than living, breathing entities. This is despite a nuanced performance from Portman, who is wonderful in an underwritten role; the frightening frenzy of Maguire’s paranoid veteran and, most real of them all, Gyllenhaal’s well-meaning but dysfunctional Tommy.

Brothers is not a war movie, but a family melodrama about guilt and acceptance. Its heightened emotions, minimal score and austere direction are a difficult mix. Director Jim Sheridan knows this, and cleverly uses the gentle humour of the family's delightful young girls to offset the tension. It's just enough, together with the performances, for Brothers to maintain its delicate balancing act, but it remains less than the sum of its quite substantial parts.

News: The Oscars 2010

Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Greg Shapiro lap it up

Here we are again, another year, another Oscar ceremony, one that is possibly destined to go down in history as the one where Avatar did not win best picture. It certainly won't go down as one of the more memorable, with little drama outside of obnoxious producer Elinor Burkett stealing the microphone from Best Documentary Short winner Roger Ross Williams, who won for Music by Prudence. Even Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's jokes fell flat (except for a pearler about Christoph Waltz's Jew hunter having arrived in Hollywood at "the mother lode") and were seemingly reading off a telepromter and without their usually spot on comic timing.

Are they looking for jokes which are actually funny?

But it wasn't a total loss.

Memorable moments include:

- Neil Patrick Harris' Busby Berkeley opening number

- The dances to the original score nominees, the first bunch in years to actually be good scores.

- Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. presenting together, the only paring to achieve any sort of zing.

Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. making with the funny

- Best score winner (for Up) Michael Giacchino telling budding artists to ignore the naysayers and that creativity is not a waste of time.

- A tribute to (American) Horror movies. Roger Ebert (in a live tweet from the show) called it "Shameless pandering to fanboys & girls." Accurate maybe, but it's still good to see them getting some love.

Christoph Waltz, due next to star in Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet

- Chistoph Waltz's "uber-bingo!" Was it ever even in question?

- Every cut away to George Clooney looking bored.

- The tribute to John Hughes. I've barely seen any of his movies, but the heartfelt words given by Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald, among others, make me want to.

Less memorable moments or moments memorable for the wrong reasons:

- Elinor Burkett's aforementioned mic-stealing incident.

- Jeff Bridges for best actor. Well deserved (and received with a standing ovation), but as George Clooney joked on the red carpet, "Well, he's gonna win, right?"

The Dude with his prize

- Avatar for cinematography? Virtual cinematography over the old-fashioned film of Inglourious Basterds? Tarantino must be flipping out.

- Sandra Bullock's Best Actress for The Blind Slide. Expected, yes, but with her winning a Razzie the previous night for All About Steve, one can't help but feel this is a newcomer vote for starring in a popular tear jerker. But too her credit she joked about it in her acceptance speech, "Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?" Kudos.

Moments that made you say WTF?

- Precious' adapted screenplay win over In the Loop? District 9? An Education? AND Up in the Air? The first three perhaps were never going to win (though In the Loop is the most hysterically foul-mouthed linguisting masterpiece in memory), but Jason Reitman's sublime Up in the Air? That great film got no love at all. Precious' win however, did give screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher the chance to give the most heartfelt speech of the night.

A surprised and moved Geoffrey Fletcher

- The Hurt Locker win for original screenplay is more understandable, though I wish Tarantino had gotten more love for his dialogue heavy WW2 yarn.

- El secreto de sus ojos winning best Foreign Film over the favourites The White Ribbon and A Prophet.

- The double Twilight presenting teams pandering to the young audience. The at best polite applause when Martin pointed them out in the audience speaks volumes (though Anna Kendrick is wasted in New Moon and magnificent in Up in the Air. She's the most talented of the quartet, by far).

The boys from The Hurt Locker in celebration

Overall it was an evening with few surprises and, despite many expecting James Cameron's epic to nab Best Picture (instead winning Cinematography, Art Direction and - gasp! - Visual Effects), it was Kathryn Bigelow's night. Her intelligent and sweaty-palm-inducing Iraq war film The Hurt Locker was a deserving winner, but one still wonders if her ex-husband's blockbuster won't have more lasting significance.

You can find the full list of winners over on IMDb.

Review: Green Zone (2010)

Released March 11, 2010

Matt Damon on the prowl in Green Zone

They might as well have called it The Bourne Zone. Reuniting that franchise’s star and director (Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass), Green Zone is a tense thriller set against the still ongoing war in Iraq. While flirting with the war’s politics and the false justification for the U.S. lead invasion, it is first and foremost an action picture, shot in the director’s typically ragged, hand-held style. Haters of the Bourne sequels’ shaky-cam be warned.

The title refers to the international safe zone in central Baghdad that at one time was the home of the transitional government. Set around 2003, it is there we find U.S. soldier Roy Miller (Damon) on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. He begins to question his intel when his MET – Mobile Exploitation Team – fails to find any of the offending devices. Surprise, surprise. The military’s source, he learns, is only known by the name “Magellan”, and has leaked information to an embedded Wall Street Journal reporter, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan). Local C.I.A. chief (Brendan Gleeson) also feels something is amiss. A machine gun rattle later and Miller finds himself an ally-deprived rogue on a quest for the truth. Sound familiar?

Say what you will about his frantic style, but Greengrass knows how to construct visceral action. His hard-hitting, quick cut realism is just as effective, in its own way, as The Hurt Locker’s slow-burning suspense. Closely resembling the standard man-out-of-his-depth-and-doesn’t-know-who-to-trust thriller, Green Zone fictionalises and condenses years of revelations and debate about the Iraq war into an easily digestible and highly-entertaining format.

Aside from its telling final shot, the film is not interested in judging the war’s legality, only that it is deplorable to deliberately deceive and manipulate. Miller stands in for those courageous individuals who are unwilling to simply accept dogma without question or justification. Early on a seemingly honest Iraqi citizen tells him there's a meeting of high ranking officials up the road. An ambush could be feasible. Despite the danger, Miller chooses to take him up on his suggestion, to which one of his subordinates responds: “Chief, we’re here to do a job, the reasons don’t matter”. “They matter to me,” he replies. I don't think he's alone with that sentiment.

DVD Review: Mao's Last Dancer (2009)

Released March 4, 2010

The elegant lines of Chi Cao (as Li Cuxin) in Mao's Last Dancer

It's a shame that Mao's Last Dancer has been barely seen outside Australia. Only garnering a release in Germany (oddly) and appearing at a few film festivals, this DVD may be the first chance many have had to see Bruce Beresford’s latest, a broad biopic of ballet-dancer extrodinarre Li Cuxin.

Aside from his dancing exploits, Cuxin became well known because of his 21 hour long detention at the Houston Chinese Consulate in 1981. An exchange student reaching the end of his term, Li had fallen for his adopted capitalist home (not to mention, his pretty girlfriend) and wished to stay. The communist Chinese authorities did not approve.

His story, from a difficult childhood in 1960s China, to his training at the grueling Beijing Dance Academy, to his subsequent stay in the United States, is related in his autobiography which became the basis for Jan Sardi’s (Shine) screenplay.

Dramatic and uplifting, it is an enjoyable but conventional rags-to-riches tale. Beresford is not afraid to tug at the heartstrings or enounciate the blatant themes of race, culture and ambition. But it’s also weak, without the conviction of thoroughly depicting the hardships enforced on him as a child.

That would perhaps have been a better film. As it is the melodrama of Mao’s Last Dancer is painted in broad strokes with touching performances from Joan Chen as Li’s mother Niang, and company director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek), a soft fatherly figure and champion of his biggest star. Everyone else, including Chi Cao as Li are just servicable, though his dual-language role and superb dancing ability impresses.

Cinematography Peter James gives the Chinese scenes a grimy, grainy quality which contrasts well to the colourful dance sequences. The film’s biggest weakness is the superficial love story between our hero and attractive dancer Elizabeth Mackey (Amanda Schull), which seems to exist solely to allow Li to play marriage card when the communist officials come knocking.

News: Creative Boredom

Never let it be said that boredom prevents creativity. It's quite the opposite, as Saul Steinberg describes:

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

For one of my co-workers today, avoiding boredom involved "reviewing" me. Apprently my exploits in the fine-art of film criticism have spread beyond the electronic borders of this blog and into my workplace; I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this collision of worlds. With a penchant for naming me BLACKMAN (my surname, if you're wondering) and the relentless questions of "are you going to review it?" regarding everything from the latest blockbuster to the pencil I'm holding, he took it upon himself to write this awfully well-wrtten gem:

JOSHUA BLACKMAN – A HARRY LAM REVIEW

5 stars

As Tom Jones once sang, it’s not unusual to feel inadequate, inferior and insignificant in the presence of film reviewing greatness. However, due to record company pressure the Welsh crooner was forced to alter these lyrics in an attempt to appease the mainstream listener. But for anyone who has ever been involved in film or its study, dabbled in art or writing, or indeed ever picked up a pen or held an opinion, one cannot help but feel the icy, unforgiving chill under the looming shadow of one master critic. Newton once famously played down his own achievements indicating that his work was only possible by “standing on the shoulder of giants.” Undoubtedly, one such giant was Joshua BLACKMAN.

An enigma, an unsolvable riddle, Joshua BLACKMAN is a man shrouded in mystery and contradictions. His surname – changed to capitals via deed poll in 1986 – is as confronting as it is misleading. Indeed the name BLACKMAN reflects the duality in his ageless writing: ferocious yet subtle. All sightings of this genius recluse suggest that he is actually white, but is definitely a man: a thinking man’s man. He is noted for his slow leisurely gait, yet those closest to him confirm that it is the sheer weight of his movie reviewing mind baring heavily upon his frame that affects his carefree, noble stride. Constantly reviewing, everything from the quality of his coffee, the colour of his desk and even the weather is given a rating out of five. His literary force has been likened to “ten Robert Christgaus strapped to cannons, and fired relentlessly and indiscriminately into the art world”. Such is his influence, that with as little as a simple turn of phrase, BLACKMAN can reduce a multimillion dollar film into a multimillion dollar flop. A master of punctuation, Joshua BLACKMAN once submitted a critique of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet consisting only of punctuation marks. Time Magazine hailed it as the “mark of a fearless mind”. He was only three years old.

Whilst his writing has grown to the same stature as that of Wordsworth and Hemingway, it is his common touch that marks him as a peerless reviewer of films and art. When asked to describe an overcast day in three words, his now immortal response was: “cold, wet and rainy”. Such was the genius and depth of these three seemingly simple words that it has become a staple in the Australian secondary school curriculum in no less than four subjects: English, History, Religious Studies and Physics.

His confronting writing style is at once innovative, challenging and complex. BLACKMAN’s now legendary critique of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor appeared at first to be a wordless indecipherable doodle. Fearing the backlash from a BLACKMAN obsessed public if a review not be made available that week, the editor published this seemingly crude black and white drawing under the title PEARL HARBOR: A JOSHUA BLACKMAN REVIEW. Understandably, the public was confounded by such a brash display of movie reviewing arrogance, yet this startling image was analysed and scrutinised by millions for months on end. Finally, seven months after its publication, Allan Thomas, an English major from Princeton University stumbled upon its meaning, revealing completely the true genius of its creator. Thomas found that by turning the image upside down, what was once an impenetrable jumble of lines and shapes was actually a Michelangelo-esque drawing of a chimpanzee eating its own excrement.

Perhaps it is only fitting that the final word should go to the great man himself. In a 1997 interview, a Village Voice journalist made the mistake of referring to BLACKMAN as the “Descartes of modern film critique” in an attempt to flatter his uncompromisingly temperamental interviewee. Offended at what he felt was a slight which did not truly encapsulate the breadth of his genius, Joshua BLACKMAN concluded the interview with this remark: “I think, therefore I review.”
Harry Lam


Epic, my friend. Epic.

And now, for my response:


JOSHUA BLACKMAN – A HARRY LAM REVIEW
A JOSHUA BLACKMAN REVIEW

5 stars

It was by pure chance of fate that today I stumbled across a great man. A man with so refined a writing style I feel inadequacy brewing in my very being; a life's work thrown into chaos in a second of startling revelation; a vocation so ingrained in one's existence that one feels their soul, ragged and heavy, being torn asunder.

The piece responsible is a stunning work of penmanship published in the Facebook Journal of Literary Criticism. His review of this humble reviewer is the purest expression of the reviewing art yet created by the mortal hand of man.

In it he claims that I, Joshua BLACKMAN, am "an enigma, an unsolvable riddle." And yet it is he who is this enigma. Hidden behind his undying love for the mythical Rabbitos and hatred for L.A. hip hop is a remarkable writing talent. Who knew what was hidden behind that peculiar smile and those uniquely forceful eyes.

When I muttered my description of the weather that cold, wet and rainy day, I felt I had reached the pinnacle of literary expression on a level unmatched even by Hemingway, Dickens or J.K. Rowling, And yet I have been upstaged. The phrases flow easily from his delicate keyboard: "the icy, unforgiving chill," "wordless indecipherable doodle," "a chimpanzee eating its own excrement." It is as impossible to comprehend the complex mind conjuring such sublime turns of phrase.

Goethe said that perhaps "only a genius is able to understand a genius." Accordingly I cannot be a genius, for the complexity of this master's pen is equally breathtaking and baffling, the raging fire of inspiration burning beneath untouchable and unknowable.

I once said "I think, therefore I review." I now realize such a description is inadequate. In this case of this great man, who's name is Harry Lam, it should have read: "I AM, therefore I review."


Like I say: never let it be said that boredom prevents creativity.

News: Chauvel Argento Festival Night #1

The Chauvel cinema in Sydney is having a mini-horror film festival with a focus on the movies of Dario Argento. First up was Argento's 1977 classic Suspiria , followed by George A. Romero’s zombie flick, Dawn of the Dead (1978).

I'll get to the films below, but the main disappointment of these screenings is that they seemed to be projected digitally, which is frankly blasphemous. The images were astonishingly clear, but with no visible grain or tangible film quality, one feels the experience was more clinical than it should have been and, especially for Argento, that the deep colours of 35mm would have added to the experience. A disappointment, but it's still a rare treat to be able to appreciate these movies on the big screen with other film fans.

Next week I'll report on the screenings of Tenebre (Argento, 1982) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974). Following that are Phenomena (Argento, 1985) and The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), and finally Deep Red (Argento, 1975) and Eaten Alive (Hooper, 1976).

Details can be found on their website under the events and festivals tab.

SUSPIRIA (1977) trailer


Before these screenings I had never seen an Argento film and I hence approached his most famous creation with great anticipation.

A surreal mind-trip of a movie, Suspiria has laughable dialogue, virtually not plot and some atrocious acting. But it’s also one of the most artful, beautiful and frightening horror movies I have seen. Argento has a way of making ever frame look like an opulently coloured painting, with vibrant use of the primary colours, especially (not suprisingly), red. Not afraid to pile on the blood (as in the famous opening slaying which involves a close up of a knife entering a girl’s heart), the scare quota is somewhat muted by the low-budget effects and too-red-to-be-real blood.

But these characteristics help give the film its disturbing hyper-real atmosphere. Instrumental is the setting of the freakish dance studio - one that could only ever exist in the movies - with its unnerving hallways and dream-like trimmings.

While the acting fluctuates between the stilted and the camp, our American heroine played by Jessica Harper, has the right mix of curiousity and vulnerability. Also in the cast is genre favourite Udo Kier, who turns up in a perfunctory and absurd exposition scene in which he explains the psychology of witches (or something).


But never mind that, with some frightening suspenseful sequences, beautiful photography and a demonic repetitve score, Suspiria is a legitimately great horror film from a period when filmmakers were not afraid to take risks.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) trailer

In contrast with the beauty of Suspriria are the low-budget thrills of George A. Romero's second zombie movie (the first being Night of the Living Dead). Classic zombies don't exactly make for interesting or scary villains with their trademark slow hobble and groans. Hence, despite the occasional intestine-spewing gore, much of Dead plays more like a comedy, replete with aspirations of social satire.

Four survivors of the global outbreak hole up in the ceiling of an abandoned shopping mall. With the entire complex as their playground and an impressive arsenal of weapons at their disposal (some obtained from the convenient gun store in the mall; only in America, you think...), hundreds of zombies are dispatched as the three men and one woman argue over their next move.

There's a wonderfully rebellious tone and some great one-liners that could only have come from the 70s: when discussing Franciene's pregnancy, the tough self-appointed leader Peter says proudly, "Do you want to abort it? It's not too late, and I know how."

The wacky analogies of zombies to shoppers and consumer culture set to innocuous musak is also a nice touch, as is the latter incursion by bikies that suggest the greater threat my still lie in the land of the living (an aspect also explored in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later).


I'm no zombie movie expert, but Dawn of the Dead has clearly earned it's stripes as a seminal film of the genre. A very enjoyable, bloody piece of work.