On a Clear Night

This weekend I saw the Australian indie musical Bran Nue Dae, Rachel Perkins' adaptation of the 1990 stage show known for bringing Aboriginal stories to the Australian stage. The film begins on an entertaining high note with a comedic number set in a church that touches on many of the themes that teenage protagonist Willie will have to deal with throughout the movie. As it goes on, the quality of the entertainment declines, but with all its flaws, it's difficult to fault the movie too much.

While the quality of the acting is unimpressive, and the musical performances do not live up to the songs themselves, my biggest complaint with the movie is that not enough was done in the adaptation process to make the story stand on its own as a film. Sometimes it felt like watching a staged reading. Lead actor Rocky McKenzie has about a thimble-full of charisma, but he leaves room for more interesting supporting performances by Geoffrey Rush, Ernie Dingo, and Tom Budge (and impressive singing by Missy Higgins and Jessica Mauboy, unsurprisingly). It would have been great to see more time and planning devoted to the musical numbers, but I wondered if efforts to keep the story true to its origins got in the way of what could have taken on new life as a great quirky musical film. And for the record, looping the audio of tap dancing into scenes where actors' feet are out of frame is against the rules.

Major themes in the film are about how to properly express identification with the Aboriginal culture, and what it means to be an Aborigine. I wondered why, then, the story was set in 1969, two years after Aboriginal people legally became considered people in Australia (previously, they were listed as native fauna). There are a number of characters or lines in the movie which hint at the systematic usage of Aboriginal women for sex that had been ongoing for decades, but it all fades into a lighthearted wink at the camera and there are no real lessons to be learned. In the end, all the characters, regardless of origin, gather around a table and sing the main chorus:

There's nothing I would rather be
Than to be an Aborigine,
And watch you take my precious land away.
For nothing gives me greater joy
Than to watch you fill each girl and boy
With superficial existential shit.

I wondered exactly how seriously we were supposed to take the movie, and landed on regarding it as a very sweet and simple musical comedy of errors, with a lot of unfulfilled potential. I wonder how it was received by viewers with no exposure to Australian history or culture, or to Australians. Thoughts?

trailer park, part deux

More trailers for you guys to watch, but I'm still having trouble embedding the videos, so I had to post links again. Sorry, again.


Towelhead (Aug. 8)
This seems to have the same kind of unsettling quality that Little Children had, and it is not totally thematically different, with pedophilia and alienation coming to the fore. This seems like one of those movies that's good, and makes you think, but leaves you with a really unpleasant feeling in your stomach. But then, could we expect any less from director Alan Ball?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZngC-tNfmG0

Tropic Thunder (Aug. 15)
War satire that isn't Delta Farce? Check. Steve Coogan? Check. Robert Downey, Jr. playing an Australian actor who undergoes a surgical procedure to look African-American, and then method acting as a black man for the entire film? Check. A movie exciting enough to prompt me to make the controversial statement that, other than Dodgeball, Ben Stiller hasn't been in a funny movie since The Royal Tenenbaums (appearances as Tony Wonder don't count)? Check. Making fun of Academy Award nominated Norbit? Check.
Red band: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSI15ltIacI


Hamlet 2 (Aug. 22)
It's got Steve Coogan (again) and Catherine Keener, and centers on a high school rock opera with the song "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" as its hit. What more could I ask for?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=z-OEuXR4_P4


The House Bunny (Aug. 22)
This one just looks stupid and funny enough to join the ranks of Grandma's Boy in my guiltiest guilty pleasures vault. When my roommate and I told her dad the premise of this movie, he countered with a story about how a few years before he went to college, the frat that he would eventually join had a live-in prostitute and her pimp serve jointly as their house mother. Touche.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m9aOSrQEqd4

Blindness (Sep. 19)
It's kind of tough for me to talk about this movie because I spent a few months out of my life lovingly adapting Jose Saramago's excellent book into my very first feature-length screenplay. I have a copy of the script that Fernando Meirelles used for his upcoming film, and I haven't been able to bring myself to read it yet. I can only say that Saramago's story is excellent, and so is Julianne Moore, so I'm sure this film will be winning every award from here to Texas. Sigh.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9EHg0SJfYeU

Australia (Nov. 14)
I have been looking forward to this movie for quite some time now, and as a devoted fan of Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain trilogy, I'm really excited to see how he's going to apply his incredible talent and skill to a pastoral epic. I think that Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are well matched, even if it was an interesting choice to cast her as a Brit (she'll be fine, it's still kind of interesting), and the trailer gives me shivers when they kiss. I think the style and the setting are going to make this movie old-school magical, and I have a feeling that it's going to be about 1,000 times better than Ron Howard's Tom-and-Nicole epic Far and Away, which I've seen like 3 times and is crazy entertaining for a horrible movie.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7gtKcr_W_fc

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Dec. 19)
I hadn't been interested in this movie at all when I'd only heard Brad Pitt's name and the curious title together, but when I realized it was a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, my interest grew. Upon viewing the trailer, which does a lot with music and lack of dialogue, it has become one of my most eagerly-anticipated films of 2008. Brad Pitt can act quite well when he's not being totally boring-looking, and I think that this movie will be what Big Fish almost was, and reach just beyond the edge of imagination to give us something totally crazy to think about.
Low quality Spanish trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1v3V5KAIyM4