Conor Bateman's Blog, page 5

Poison Berry in My Brain

Japanese romantic comedy Poison Berry in My Brain (脳内ポイズンベリー) might have an evocative title, but it’s the premise that gets you in the door.Yōko Maki plays Ichiko Sakurai, an aspiring novelist looking for love whose decisions and thoughts are guided by a boardroom of five separate emotional entities inside her brain. Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. A minor controversy emerged in Japan upon the release of Disney Pixar’s Inside Out, which has a strikingly similar conceit to...

Hit 2 Pass

Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Passcomes saddled with the vague label ofexperimental documentary, which indicates not only that the film eludes conventional classification but also that it’s a challenging watch. In the end, that’s not really the case. Walker’s film reveals itself to be a multi-faceted concoction of familiar elements: it’s a travelogue, reflection on colonialism, interrogation of nostalgic storytelling and the end product of a group of young filmmakers experimenting with form and image....

Fear Itself

Though mostly billed as an essay film about horror cinema in the lead-up to its release on the BBC iPlayer service, Charlie Lyne’s follow-up to his teen movie dissectionBeyond Clueless is more of an imaginative mosaic, less focused on drawing out clinical points about horror film technique and design than a broader reading of affecting cinema. In that vein it’s one of the most quietly impressive films of the year: an unassuming collection of clips skillfully patched together that acts as bot...

Junun

The announcement of Paul Thomas Anderson’s first documentary earlier this year caught a lot of people off-guard. For starters, it was to have its world premiere mere months after being first announced, would run for under an hour and was apparently focusing on Jonny Greenwood’s trip to India. Whilst PTA has been the subject of a documentary as expansive as his films in Mark Rance’s That Moment: Magnolia Diary, this latest venture seemed too slight, too small in scope. Away from the hype and...

Office

The genre-hopping Hong Kong master Johnnie To takes his first step into the world of musicals in apredictablyidiosyncratic fashion withOffice, less a jaunty financial thriller than an ensemble drama about the power dynamics in both romantic and professional relationships. The literal English translation for the film’sMandarin title (華麗上班族) is “Gorgeous White-Collar Workers”,which not only clarifiesthe film’s primary focusbut alsoactsa clear shift away from the stageplay on which the film is...

Ricki and the Flash

An uplifting story of a family reunitedisn’t exactly what you get in Jonathan Demme’s consistentlydelightfulRicki and the Flash, a film that deals with self-delusion for most of its runtime. Demme and screenwriter Diablo Cody declare as much in the film’s opening scene – as the titular rock goddess (Meryl Streep) and her band play through Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl”, the stage lights and tight close-ups give way to wider shots of their venue: a dive bar in the San Fernan...

The Wolfpack – An Interview with Director Crystal Moselle

Crystal Moselle’sThe Wolfpack is one of this year’s most intriguing and enigmatic documentaries, telling the story of a group of siblings who spent most of their childhood cooped up in their apartment in New York City. The film has played to rave reviews at Sundance and Tribeca, and has screened locally at Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival. Whilst she was down in Melbourne during that festival, we were able to speak to Moselle about her film.

So I know the oft-wr...

City of Gold

You’re keenly aware of the food documentary, those pretty and oft-undercooked films about food preparation masquerading as character studies. You’re also aware of the trappings of the biographical documentary, so often straying into hagiography and eschewing natural messiness for neatly partitioned ‘chapters of life’. The collision of these two forms is, for you, something to maybe throw on Netflix when you’re bored, material primed to allow your mind to switch off. You don’t expect much fro...

Mistress America

It’s been threeyears since Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s first major collaboration as writers and filmmakersburst into cinemas and the public consciousness.A story of a young woman sensing the end of a lifelong friendship as the freedom of youth gives way to the dull demands of adulthood,Frances Ha was a sharp shift away fromGreenberg andMargot at the Wedding, marrying an overt aesthetic debt to the French New Wave with Baumbach’s (and now Gerwig’s) trademark witty dialogue.Mistress Ameri...

A German Youth

Jean-Gabriel Périot’sfirst foray into feature-length filmmaking,A German Youth(Une jeunesse allemande), carries over the archival approach taken in many of his short-form works. He’s made a career out of re-purposing the past, from his Ken Jacobs-esque Under Twilight to thehaunting photography-basedHiroshima short200,000 Phantoms, the potency of each less derived from the selection of footage itself than the way in which it is juxtaposed or altered. InA German Youth, the concept being made c...