FILM .... with Tim Milfull
Green Zone (M)
Director: Paul Greengrass
Stars: Matt Damon
Rating: 4/5 9115-minutes, now screening
Even before Matt Damon came along, director Paul Greengrass was making taut thrillers like the IRA tragedy, Bloody Sunday. His partnership with the young actor seems to be paying off in spades, with another Bourne flick, the superbly wrought 9/11 drama featuring mainly unknown actors, United 93, and now another Damon outing, albeit with slightly less fisticuffs, and a whole lot more subterfuge.
The title – Green Zone – refers to the little oasis of peace that for many years offered sanctuary for Iraqi mandarins and expats sent to Baghdad to bring democracy to the former dictatorship. Here, soldiers, contractors, government hacks and spies alike could escape from the high probability of death, injury or escape that loomed outside the fences in Iraq-proper.
Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller heads a team charged with locating the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction, and by mid-2003 is going slightly loopy on one ridiculous goose-chase after another, all the while assured by government flacks that their intelligence is bullet-proof.
When a chance encounter raises the possibility of apprehending one of Saddam Hussein’s generals, Miller is convinced that the truth behind the WMDs or lack thereof is within reach. Working with the weary CIA spook, Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), Miller dodges red herrings thrown by the duplicitous government advisor, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), and gradually treads closer to an answer that he might not be able to cope with.
Greengrass and scriptwriter Brian Helgeland use Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone as their compelling template, and the result is an exhausting thriller, constantly ratcheting up the tension.
Monsters made for 3D
How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
Director: Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders
Stars: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and others
Rating: 4/5 109-minutes, screening from March 25
If the main non-human character in the latest 3D adventure – How to Train Your Dragon – looks vaguely familiar, it’s probably because ‘Toothless’ has similar features to another mythical and mysterious creature: the Stitch in Lilo and Stitch.
Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders created both monsters from stories they had also written. But their new film has characters that make Stitch look simply primitive by comparison. The medieval world in which the hapless Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) lives is a harsh, wondrous coastline regularly terrorised by dragons of all shapes and sizes.
Surviving in such an environment means adapting, and the Vikings – led by the humongous Stoick (Gerard Butler) – have made an art-form of protecting their turf and bulking up for battle. But Stoick’s son, Hiccup is the kind of weedy, super-geek disappointment that will never amount to anything, and would certainly never qualify for dragon-fighter training.
When a test-firing of his latest wacky invention brings down a never before seen Night Fury, Hiccup thinks that his ticket to legitimacy has finally arrived. But as he builds a grudging relationship with this strange creature, Hiccup realises that the time-honoured hatred between his people and the dragons has very shaky foundations.
I’m not one to fuss over 3D – Avatar was pretty cool, really, but other animated 3D features like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs end up being a tired novelty – this new film, however, is simply extraordinary. The humans might be exaggerated in their proportions, and the dragons wild and sometimes ridiculous, but DeBlois and Sanders delight in the finer details, with How to Train Your Dragon evolving into a rich and rewarding fairytale.
THE BINGE
Heartfelt view on climate change
The Burning Season (M)
Prime Mover (M)
Genova (M)
Public Enemy #1 (MA15+)
All now available through Madman Entertainment
The Burning Season has been a labour of love for a number of years now. Known for her extremely personal documentaries – like The Man Who Stole My Mother’s Face and Losing Layla – one of Australia’s most successful documentary producer-directors, Cathy Henkel again wanted to make a difference, this time in the climate change debate.
The result is a tense examination of the effect deforestation has on local and global scales, from the political corruption and life-changing influences on subsistence farmers and the resulting near extinction of orang-utans, to the innovative solutions offered in carbon trading. Moving to the magic-realism of life on the road outside Dubbo, David Caesar – Mullet and Idiot Box – reunites Suburban Mayhem stars, Michael Dorman and Emily Barclay in Prime Mover, a bittersweet love story that replaces gypsy wagons with semi-trailers. And on to more continental fare, ever avoiding categories, British writer-director, Michael Winterbottom transplants a grieving young family to Genova to lick their wounds. While not quite as satisfying as his other exciting work, Genova proves the English filmmaker is prepared to take risks.
The same could be said of the versatile French actor Vincent Cassell who started in local independent productions like La Haine, moved on to big budget Bond and Ocean’s movies, and now, in Public Enemy #1 brings to the screen the story of one of France’s most notorious real-life criminals: Mesrine – a violent, psychopathic gangster who terrorised his homeland.
