Conor Bateman's Blog, page 9
June 9, 2015
Love & Mercy
Bill Pohlad’s film about Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind the Beach Boys, becomes one of the more unusual and enigmatic biopics in recent memory purely by virtue of the fact that it is two distinctly separate narratives smashed together. Therein lies the root cause of many of the problems of the film, that the narratives of young Brian (Paul Dano) and middle-aged Brian (John Cusack) never really coalesce effectively until the abstract and surreal climax. That said, each plot thread on...
June 8, 2015
Near Death Experience
Repetition and routine are at the heart of Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’sNear Death Experience, a dryly absurd and darkly comic look at fate, suicide and nature starring controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Thefilm’s irritating opening credits concern a thunderstorm, with the list of cast and crew flashing onto the screen in time with the flashes of lightning, an early scene in Paul’s (Houellebecq) car sees him begin rhyming to the incessant beeping that is playing, and t...
June 7, 2015
The Russian Woodpecker
Chad Garcia’sThe Russian Woodpecker is all at once an urgentlook at the modern trajectory ofUkraine under the increasing influence of Russia, an amateurish conspiracy documentary on the verge of an interesting theory, and a half-hearted character study of an eccentric Ukrainian artist, Fedor Alexandrovich, dealing with trauma through delusion. On paper, or perhaps in Salt Lake City, the film sounds like an engaging and unique story, but in practice it’s a shambolic mess.
When a documentary t...
June 6, 2015
Welcome to Leith
Until the later months of 2013, the town of Leith in North Dakota, the land of which is three square miles, had 24 residents. It was a quiet and isolated rural area, a place where the town’s mayor, Ryan Schock, drove the school bus in the morning before tending to his farm. Six months later, we watch as Schlockleads a group of locals in tearing down and burning a neighbouring house, then teaches his wife how to fire a handgun in an empty field. The journey from serenity to paranoia is what d...
Vincent
Thomas Salvador, both the director of and the titular character in Vincent, has delivered an unusual but ultimately hollow variation on the superhero narrative with his debut feature. That’s not to say his film isn’t interesting or valueless, in fact at times Salvador makes a salient case for why films of this ilk should continue to be made; there’s stock in the temporal mythmaking, the mesh of realistic setting and extraordinary human endeavour is compelling almost by default, and the pursu...
June 5, 2015
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine
As a result of being a last-minute addition to the Sydney Film Festival program, and lacking the monumental hype that has followed his controversialGoing Clear, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary,Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, is easily overlooked. In the wake of the widely-deridedAshton Kutcher-starringbiopicJobs and in the lead-up to the much-anticipated Sorkin-pennedsteve jobs, the life and times of the Apple co-founder is a narrative on the verge of overexposure. Gibney’s film, though...
Welcome to Leith – An Interview with Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker
Welcome to Leith, a partially Kickstarter-funded independent documentary about a small town in North Dakota, is one of the more surprising and impressive documentary films screening this year at Sydney Film Festival. Ahead of its Australian premiere we spoke to the directors of the film, Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker.
So firstly, what I want to ask you aboutthe process of finding this story. I know you’ve said in previous interviews that you first foundit from a New York Ti...
Sunrise
Modern neo-noir from India seems to have been defined by the work of Anurag Kashyap, with his script for Satya (1998) seen as the beginning of “Mumbai noir” movement,which he furthered inhis own dark forays into the world of crime as noir, in particularNo SmokingandUgly. A film he produced in 2013,Amit Kumar’sMonsoon Shootout, would seem the clearest reference point for Partho Sen-Gupta’sSunrise, a similarly nihilistic look at the obsession of the chase set against the backdrop of a torrenti...
Station to Station
It’s hard to define exactly whatStation to Station is but perhaps easier to work out what it is not. It’s not a music documentary, as its programming in the Sounds on Screen section of the Sydney Film Festival would suggest. It’s not a series of short films, despite being divided up into 62 one-minute vignettes. It’s not an examination of the role trains play in our lives, or really any salient statement on traversing America by rail. Doug Aitken’s film, then, is something other than atypica...
June 4, 2015
Goodnight Mommy
The Austrian chiller amongst this year’s Freak Me Out line-up traffics in sustained dread, with crisp minimalist cinematography and a very assured sense of place and isolation.Goodnight Mommy almost makes you want to never get to any real climax, as the tension mounts in such an expertly crafted fashion. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who both previously worked together on the 2012 documentaryKern, have directed a film that’s not particularly original or unique in its narrative or executi...
