FILM ... with Tim Milfull
The Cabin in the Woods (MA15+)
Director: Drew Goddard
Stars: Kristin Connelly. Chris Hemsworth, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford
Rating: 4/5
95-minutes, screening from 16-30 June at Palace Barracks
There was almost a mild revolution among Australian fanboys recently when Roadshow announced that The Cabin in the Woods would go straight to DVD. This after some very excited feedback following the Australian premiere of the film at the Gold Coast Film Festival at the end of April.
Considering the industry-wide buzz over the success of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, many were surprised that his involvement as co-writer alongside director, Drew Goddard (Cloverfield) wouldn’t be played up as a massive drawcard.
In any case, TCITW will be screening in Australia – for only two weeks in Brisbane – and lovers of horror cinema will be relishing the opportunity to see this epic on a big screen.
Goddard and Whedon take the conventional teen slasher genre and turn it on its head here, sending five clear teen stereotypes on a weekend into the woods to be the subjects of a little bit of slice and dice.
But there are much more sinister forces at work in this universe, with some quite banal salarymen behind the scenes controlling everything that happens in and around the titular cabin.
And no, this isn’t a spoiler, as we find out about the spooks very early in the film. The question we’re soon asking is not Who?, but Why?
With a shared CV that includes stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, few will be surprised that there are some wild ideas at play behind this new film, and when the cat is let out of the bag towards the end of the film, suddenly all bets are off.
I wasn’t the only one in the cinema feeling gobsmacked at the spectacle that unfolded. The Cabin in the Woods is a whole lot of gruesome fun, but only for those who are prepared to suspend disbelief for ninety minutes or so.
Old hands get cast aside
Men in Black III (M)
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Stars: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones,
Josh Brolin
Rating: 3/5
106-minutes, now screening
Far be it from me to point out the elephant in the room, but isn’t it significant that the third Men in Black film features Tommy Lee Jones for a few short minutes, and nothing at all from veteran Hollywood actor Rip Torn who played the Chief Spook Z in the first two films?
Granted, the eternally gorgeous Emma Thompson is a fine choice to replace Rip Torn as O, and casting Josh Brolin as a younger version of Tommy’s K is just inspired. But neither Jones nor Torn are actually dead yet, so why waste their talents (unless they wanted to keep their distance from the production)?
Tommy Lee Jones does bookend the film with his dour cragginess, but we’ll never really know why he seems so unexcited about this latest outing.
For the rest of the film, Josh Brolin plays the K the Younger, who is the subject of a rescue mission set up by Smith’s J in response to some tricky time-travelling chicanery perpetrated by alien assassin, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement).
Along the way, J has to contend with the proto-political correctness of the late sixties, and the unexpected charm of the younger, much less tightly-wound version of his partner.
It’s not that MiB3 is a bad film; it’s quite entertaining despite some planet-sized holes in the logic of the story. I just wonder why director Barry Sonnenfeld and his writers felt it necessary to mess so carelessly with a formula that worked so well before.
THE BINGE
Call Me Fitz (MA15+) now available through Hopscotch
Albert Nobbs (M) available from 30 May through Hopscotch
Tyrannosaur (MA15+) now available through Madman
OSS117 Collection (M) available from 6 June through Hopscotch
Jason Priestley has been surprisingly busy since his stint as Brandon on Beverley Hills 90210, but if you had asked me to name anything he’d been in, I would have been stumped. That said, I wonder if his extraordinary turn in Call Me Fitz (below right) as sleazy car salesman, Richard Fitzpatrick might be one of the best things he has done.
No taboos are left unviolated in this oddly black Canadian comedy: you have been warned.
Rodrigo García’s film Albert Nobbs brings to life a pet project that Glenn Close has been nursing since she played the character in a stage production in the early eighties. Portraying a woman playing a man in a man’s world, Close is quite incredible, but the overall film has the cold and clinical feel of the cruel Victorian curiosities that forced women like Nobbs to dress up in the first place.
One of my favourite films from BIFF 2011, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur was an odd mix of domestic violence and tender romance. Peter Mullan plays the chronic alcoholic Joseph who finds a vague form of redemption after meeting the Hannah (Olivia Coleman), a charity volunteer who hides a dark secret at home. This cruel and confronting story has a surprisingly compassionate heart.
Before Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin became household names for their Oscar-winning silent film The Artist, they collaborated on two remakes inspired by a famous French franchise from the fifties (my apologies). OSS117 was the name of a clueless superspy who made Maxwell Smart look like James Bond, and his contemporary incarnation is a glorious exercise in slapstick.
