The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

The focus of the discussion around The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007) centres on its main themes of mass-media circus and celebrity obsession. And rightly so due to our current cultural climate But as director Andrew Dominik displayed with his last (and first) feature, Chopper (2000), his interest is in the power struggle and fascination felt between two men – where one is charismatic and psychotic, the other weak but infatuated.

Where the aesthetic of Chopper was claustrophobic and grainy – with tight interior shots in the cell and home dominated by Eric Bana as Chopper (reminiscent of the palpable violence and menace of Ray Winstone in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth (1998)) – Jesse James is full of light, colour and the wide expanse of middle America. There’s no mistaking the sumptuous work of cinematographer Roger Deakins (involved in anything by the Coen Brothers).

Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford) and Casey Affleck (Robert Ford) steal the show here, with Rockwell arguably the standout – his attempts to diffuse various situations with laughter and jokes makes for compelling viewing.

Brad Pitt’s (Jesse James) performance is layered and nuanced and the menace – especially sitting at the dinner table with Charley, Robert and Zee James (Mary Louise Parker) – is almost childlike as he plays with the taught emotion of the room.

Childishness is something that runs throughout the film. None of these ‘men’ seem to have grown out of adolescence. When Robert finds his brother Charley and Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner) rummaging through his box of Jesse James paraphernalia, the scene is one of boyhood bedroom bullying. The boys sleep and eat together, dormitory style, and crash around the house in fights and shouts.

Robert cannot shake off his childlike wonder and affection for James until he has shot him in the head and then recreated the murder a thousand times on stage. Affleck gives a supreme performance in awkward obsession.

Jesse James represents a period of change. A cowboy with one foot stuck in the stirrup of the past, the other on the industrial ground of the onrushing Victorian era. Holding up the train, James stands symbolically on lumber piled up on the track – the dark forest all around him, the steam-train lighting him up like a beacon. Later, when Robert and Charley flee James’ home having committed murder, we see spread across the valley floor, for the first time, an industrial landscape of factories and brick homes. Behind, silhouetted against the clear sky, James’ home, alone, on the edge of nothing.

New Zealand Film Festival - Manufactured Landscapes

Most of the most interesting films at the International Film Festival are documentaries. I have added many to my 'must-see' list now as Helen and I have seen only a handful.

A lot of my interest is in the rapid development of China. Especially after researching my article, The Great River Theft. Helen and I saw Dong which was not my first choice. I had wanted to check out Still Life, Jia Zhang-Ke's examination of ordinary Chinese people displaced by the construction of The Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest - but it was one of the few films to sell out. A good sign I feel. Dong is his companion piece, also filmed around The Three Gorges and Bangkok, which follows a painter.

One other film I missed - due to the dog we are looking after having the runs! - was Manufactured Landscapes. It follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels the world observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. Most of his most stunning images are of mass production in China, and the changing face of The Three Gorges where entire cities were raised to the ground by those living there by hand (the subject of Dong and Still Life) and then rebuilt, again by the same people, in new locations.

This clip is from an interesting website Ted, and is a talk by the photographer Burtynsky.





Helen and I did get to enjoy a more light-hearted documentary based in China. Les Blank has been making great documentaries for years, especially early bayou-style music stories. In All In This Tea he follows David Lee Hoffman as he searches for the best, home-grown, organic tea in China. There is a subtext regarding mass production in China as he drags the factory owners with him to the peasant farmers to show how their tea is of a much higher quality. But first and foremost it's about the cultural exchange and social interactivity surrounding tea. We are now on the lookout for a tea set so we can start trying some 'proper' tea.




The last film we saw was Build A Ship, Sail To Sadness. On paper it looked like the perfect film for Helen and I. "Solitary oddball Vincent mopeds through the Scottish Highlands with a dream of healing the community's loneliness with a mobile disco. A film about the joy of music and a yearning for the ecstasy of art."

Perhaps it was our desire to see the Scottish Highlands in all its glory that tainted our experience. The film is shot in over-saturated High 8 so the colours are lurid and livid. The best description I've heard calls it "a cross between Local Hero and Borat".

Vincent is a Scandinavian fellow in cricket jumper, rain mac and pink crash helmet who travels the bleak Highlands on his scooter. He stops and talks to various locals telling them he wants to cure everyone's loneliness through a mobile disco. It becomes rapidly apparent, as each scooter scene ends with Vincent stuffing his nostrils down the gas-tank and then passing out, that the loneliness is his own. The locals are happy enough.

The lo-fi catchy and often hilarious pop tunes are all the actor's originals, and you won't have seen the Scottish landscape shot in such an arresting fashion before, but we left disappointed - although we laughed plenty, a highlight being when he climbs a hill to convert a man burning heather to the joys of disco, only to be turned away by the man's fixation on all things heather-related.

Being ex-pats I think our idea of Scotland is firmly fixed in a traditional 'hands-off' watercolour ideal. Had we been living in the Highlands or Glasgow ourselves, this film would have been a delight.

Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) (2006)

I'd decided to check this film out mainly because it was Thai. Helen and I had spent 9 months there and I knew that we would take something from it regardless of content. We were both quietly blown away by it. This is a meditative piece of cinema in the David Lynch mould of narrative bending. Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells a simple story based on his own life (his parents were doctors in a hospital) of a female doctor. The story begins in a rural hospital with an interview and then carries on delightfully with a funny exchange mostly off-screen as the credits roll. You realize the director is having fun when one of the characters says he is already bored with this film-making process. The other replies that this is only take 5, there is a long way to go. Characters often break into natural fits of laughter as they talk. There is a gentle understanding of people, and they are given room to breathe.

Like Lynch's Lost Highway, halfway through the story begins again. Same characters, only this time the setting has changed, and the perspective we are given also differs. Now we are in a modern urban hospital. As the classic Thai saying goes: "Same same but different."

The characters' discussion of Buddhism, reincarnation and previous lives now takes on heightened meaning. You try to remember what was said before, just as they try to remember who they were before. "I was not human in my previous life."

Symbolism plays a large part in the film. Water, mirrors. We are given lingering shots of The Buddha and modern statues and a droning soundscape grows as the camera fixes on long interior corridor shots.

This is a lush, funny, patient and poignant film that asks many questions. I will be seeking out his other works.

This is the trailer:


This is a sequence near the end of the film:

Biyeolhan geori (A Dity Carnival) (2006)

Next up was A Dirty Carnival, a South Korean gangster flick with heart.

Obviously low-budget, I was feeling a little detached from the drama unfolding on screen. But from nowhere the film surprised me with a sudden visceral burst of extreme violence. Fist on flesh kind of stuff. Perhaps a few spinning round-house kicks, but nothing that looked too out of the ordinary for our hero - well played by In-seong Jo - which reminded me of the natural fighting talents of Phanom Yeeram (Tony Jaa) in Ong-Bak.

A Soundtrack fueled by a pseudo-Greek waltz on the accordian lent the film a world-weary air, although within the film were strategic set-piece musical sequences as each main character had a go in expressing themselves through karaoke.

This was a film within a film, and linked nicely to the previous showing of Herzog's Rescue Dawn in its shared need to blur fiction-reality. Recommended for all Korean film fans.

New Zealand International Film Festival - Rescue Dawn (2006)

The lights came up, credits continued to roll, I sat till the very end. The only person in front of me shook his head and chuckled knowingly at the final title to appear: "Top Gun Productions 2006" Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn had just finished, Christian Bale's character escaping his vietcong prison and surviving the jungle. I knew I should also find it funny, and kinda did, but not as much as the other guy.

As I collected my coat I realised no one had left the theatre yet. It must be a film festival audience.

It is New Zealand's 36th International Film Festival, and being a writer I was free to attend most of the day.

It was my first time in Wellington's Embassy Theatre and the main cinema is a majestic three-tier affair reminiscent of Glasgow Film Theatre's Cinema One.I'd never actually seen a Herzog film at the cinema. And he has a taste for man vs wilderness in epic tales of struggle. Stuff you should really watch on the big screen.

So I was quietly enthused as the lights went down (although slightly annoyed to see the margins of the frame over the curtains, something I have become heightened to since working as a projectionist). The story is of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German-American fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Captured and viciously tortured by the Viet Cong, Dengler seized an opportunity to escape, taking two American POWs with him.

Herzog seems to have found in Bale his new Klaus Kinski - an actor willing/capable of undergoing extreme duress and characterization to fulfill a role - although Jeremy Davies seemed to be outdoing him in the prison camp with a caved in malnutrition-ravaged skeletal frame that Bale wasn't even close to in The Machinist.

Davies was also a delight with his twisted finger pointing paranoid rants like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. There was a good vein of humour throughout, with the pilots watching a dated jungle survival video and making jokes before going on their fateful mission. I will be trawling my way through the Herzog films I have missed so far after seeing this.

No Country For Old Men

I was real excited to learn that the Coen brothers have made a film version of Cormac MacCarthy's No Country For Old Men.

You can watch the trailer here.

Tommy Lee Jones will no doubt have the best self-deprecating one-liners.



The Coen brothers' sly humour will serve the dark novel well I'm sure.

Trailer Mash

This is something I've dreamed about doing since I was a kid: cutting up classic movies and reimagining them. For a while I kept a list of great falls in movies. Off the top of my head I always remember Carrie telekinising the kid who name calls at her off his bike next to a tree. Then there was the trailer for the movie with all the Beatles covers for the soundtrack. It starred Sean Penn and was called I am Sam. I never saw it but have the soundtrack and remember the trailer because he does this hilarious slip and fall going down a hospital corridor. Anyway, it was my dream to splice together a montage of great slipps and falls in movies to some unforgettable piece of music. I never could fix on what should be played.

Anyway, this website called The Trailer Mash reimagines movies by making up a new trailer spliced together with other movies. I just watched The Shining reimagined as a romantic comedy. Next up is Lord of the Rings - Transformers.