Category Archive: FILM
Peggy Guggenheim
The Life of an Art Addict (Anton Gill) (2002) Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland) She was the Art Groupie par excellence, with more passion and panache than learning or taste, but she brought work to the attention of her rich friends and thereby both sustained talent and helped corrupt the art market. Gill’s work is like a non-fiction Apes of God: bitchy, knowing and a huge laugh. Ms Vreeland, in presenting an essentially linear, coherent, and interesting documentary, has unearthed some biographical material taped in the late 1970s (the subject died in 1979) and padded it nicely with film,…
Continue Reading →Grey Gardens
'Don't need men if you have cats.'
(Dir. David and Albert Maysles) (1976) Lifestyles of the squalid and shameless…Edith and Edie Beale live in their ramshackle mansion in the Hamptons, cats lolling about, voiding, and racoons climbing through great holes in the roof. Daughter Edie swans about, recalling an interrupted career on Broadway; mother Edith (aunt to Jackie Onassis) sits in bed, watching, like a big spider. Two years of footage has been distilled into doco-length, where not much occurs beyond regular ranting, but try to look away. This eye-view seems like exploitation to us, but, nevertheless, of definite morbid interest. For this reason, it has since been filmed…
Continue Reading →Python is Squashed
“Absolutely Anything” (Dir. Terry Jones) (2015) Let’s get this over with: this is the Worst Picture of the Year. It’s Monty Python’s Tomb. There’s not an ounce of wit or a solitary laugh in it. Derivative, tired, completely lustreless. Every person in or connected with it is diminished. Simon Pegg took a wrong career turn after Spaced and Sean of the Dead. Or rather, he missed the turn towards something new and kept straight down the road of playing gormless, anorak-wearing types, till he hit this dead end. There is no need to explain the thing – just pass on by….
Continue Reading →Florence and the Uffizi Gallery
(photo by Chris Wee)
(Dir. Luca Viotto) (2015) This documentary on the city that invented the Renaissance is a treat but it could have been better, says Director Pete: We don’t need an actor (albeit highly competent Simon Merrells) in a shiny suit and dubious red flannel to ‘play’ the ‘ghost’ of Lorenzo the Magnificent to talk about his ‘feelings’ and his cultured mates. Medici was formidable, and deserved better. We wanted 3D. We got 2D. We didn’t really appreciate the Director’s exegesis concerning various masterworks. With all due respect to his obvious erudition, they struck us as squarely phallocentric. No problem with that, but it…
Continue Reading →Casablanca
"Forget Paris"
(Dir. Michael Curtiz) (1942) We recall this classic-of-classics in the wake of the horror in Paris. The soccer fans leaving the bombed-out stadium did it: Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons ! (Take note, Australia: La Marseillaise – now, that’s a national anthem for you). And in the best ‘B’ film ever made*, Paul Henreid leads the band and crowd in Rick’s Café in a rousing version, drowning out nasty Conrad Veidt’s Teutonic warbling “Die Wacht am Rhein”. [*David Shipman (“The Great Movie Stars”) called Casablanca “probably the best bad film ever made”]. What a cast – Humphrey Bogart as Rick…
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