Art Smitten

For me personally, reality television is not something that I’m a fan of; I don’t like the staged humour, staged love, and staged drama, as I could get all that from an actual written episode of fictional television, such as Fargo or The Fall. However, Phil Keoghan's The Amazing Race, alongside some other American reality shows, stand out among others, for either its ridiculousness, or its actual credibility, such as Keoghan’s show. Thus, stepping into the directing seat for another documentary, Keoghan brings us Le Ride, pretty much a sequel to “The Ride”, with some French mixed in. Le Ride is truly an interesting, one of a kind documentary in its own right. Keoghan decides to recreate the 1928 Tour de France in honour of the Australasian team which consisted of three Australians, Hubert Opperman, Percy Osborn and Ernest Bainbridge, and one New Zealander, Harry Watson.

The race itself is known as one of the hardest and most brutal tours of all time, with only 41 racers finishing out of around 160. Le Ride documents Phil Keoghan, his friend Ben Cornell, and a crew as they recreate the race on bikes from the same time and place as the 1928 race, as it intercuts actual radio reports from 1928 of the Australisians teams journey to France, racing, and finally completion of the dreaded race. Keoghan, an avid cyclist and New Zealand born himself, honours the four racers for the better part of the film, consistently cutting between intense and hilarious moments with his own experiences riding the 1928 route, with discussions about the four racers, quotes from them, and drilling into the audience the hardship which each rider had to go through as they competed. The film itself mirrors the two races quite well. Whilst Keoghan’s recreation isn’t easy, for the most part it’s injury free, peaceful, and funny, whilst the images from the 1928 include bloody crashes, boils and sores from riding too much, and in some cases death. Keoghan emphasizes the difference in the two races, with him commenting on how hard it would of been for the Australasian team then, if Keoghan and Ben are struggling years later without even having a clock to beat.

However, stepping aside from the history and excitement of the recreation of a race, it's Keoghan’s background in reality television which leaves an interesting mark on this doco. A multitude of the shots within the documentary can be mistaken for actual dramatic movie shots. I’m not talking about long sweeping shots of drones angled down on mountains in the France. I’m talking about extreme close ups on Keoghan as he stares dramatically into the distance, as if waiting for an army to approach. The shots can also be lined up very well with of cause the shots done in The Amazing Race, and other reality shows. These shots add tension, drama and shock value to the program, as viewers can become more immersed with the show and the story it tells. I’m not sure the same effect is achieved using it in a documentary like this, as the documentary story is already fairly laid out with what’s going to happen, so the use of drama is almost irrelevant. Nevertheless, it adds a certain quality which separates it from other documentaries of its kind.

Le Ride celebrates foreign relations through sport, the might of Australians in the face of hardship and the Tour de France itself all in 90 minutes, and in addition manages to include humour, drama and even some ties to reality television. You might not be a fan of the other shows that he’s involved in, however, Keoghan manages to capture something special with this documentary, which keeps viewers captivated and gives them a good laugh as well.

Written by Hamish Vallance

Click here for Hamish and Christian's interview with Phil Keoghan

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Hamish and Christian chat to The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan about his new documentary, Le Ride, now playing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until February 12, 2017.

Click here for Hamish's review of the film

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Hamish, Smithers and Gillian speak to Senior Curator Stephen Zagala about Life Aquatic, his exhibiton that's currently showing at the Monash Gallery of Art until February 26, 2017.

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There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance.

Jackie, the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the point of view of his wife, Jacqueline Lee Kennedy. Mostly it's a psychological portrait of a grieving, widowed mother of two small children who has some very difficult decisions to make. There are countless movie protagonists who've been put in this same predicament, but of course she also just so happens to be the First Lady of the United States, and her husband just so happened to be the President. Because of their positions, any gossip about their private lives is thought of as political fodder and is of great interest to the public. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay works across three separate but very close points in time: the few days after his death, flashbacks from the last few weeks of his life and a press interview conducted in Jackie's new home, after she has left the White House. The journalist (Billy Crudup) says that after seeing how poised she was during her television tour of the White House, he thought she could have a career on the small screen. She's quite offended by this idea, but she does know how the media works. She knows she is going to be asked for a piece by piece, moment by moment account of how it all happened and how she has been coping. She also knows that if she gives them nothing, they'll just interpret her silence however they want (most likely cruelly), so she makes sure to tell him what he can and can't print from the whole exchange. She doesn't want him to publish anything misleading, even if it’s what she actually said. She has no qualms about being slightly dishonest with the world in order to show them her truest self.

In many ways, Larraín and Oppenheim are being driven by the same curiosity as the journalist. This film is an intensely personal account of everything she felt, thought and dealt with over that terrible week, with occasional glimpses at what the rest of the world was going through too. Such a narrow focus in a historical film is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you only have 100 minutes it's best not to bite off more than you can chew, but it can also feel like a frustrating waste of all that meaty material from what’s happening around her. In Jackie, people sometimes talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles de Gaulle, Vietnam and the like, but most of what you see and remember are close ups of the First Lady as she is steadily imploding. The character of Jackie, as the title would suggest, basically is the film. Playing her would have been a tall order for any actor that Larraín might have cast. If she'd been someone with a weak screen presence, this would’ve been a trainwreck. Luckily for him, he cast Natalie Portman. 6 years after Black Swan, Portman looks set to take home another Best Actress Oscar for playing a hard-working woman who is slowly falling apart before the audience's eyes (although, unlike Nina, Jackie does manage to put herself back together again). Once again, she fully embodies every bit of pain, pressure, confusion and terror her character is feeling. For much of the film, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine looks like he's capturing a live theatre performance, and is content to let her powerhouse acting carry the film. Meanwhile, Mica Levi’s musical score is overly theatrical, and seems determined to be the star of the film instead of her.

There's no doubt that as a Natalie Portman showcase, Jackie effortlessly succeeds, but her character does feel at odds with the rest of the film's world. The most intimate scenes with the First Lady have quite a polished and digital feel to them, while all the major "events" in the film (the assassination, the funeral, Oswald's arrest) have more of a grainy period quality, which lends them a lot of credibility. While with Mrs Kennedy you certainly feel like you're watching a high-profile actress take on the part, whenever the brilliantly cast Caspar Phillipson is onscreen, you just feel like you're looking at the real JFK: that’s how much of a likeness he is.

It might have been more effective to film the whole movie in that celluloid style, but as it is, Jackie is a very engaging 21st Century look at one of the most earth-shattering tragedies of the 1960s. I suppose a fair bit of Jacqueline Kennedy's personal journey is emblematic of the global aftermath of her husband's death, and how people wanted him to be remembered. Interestingly, a later exchange with her local priest (John Hurt) is pretty much reflective of Jackie’s gradual success as a film, and not just as a Natalie Portman fan piece. Initially, both the priest and the film are saying what they need to say to justify their presence here – nothing more, nothing less – but eventually they both admit to their own limitations and give honest answers about where they think we should go all from here.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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Special guests Mike Loder and Charles Terrier stay around to tell Andrew and Christian what they admired about Amy Adams' two big releases of 2016 and how they might influence their own future cinematic work.

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Part 2 of the interview where Christian and Andrew chat to Melbourne filmmakers Charles Terrier and Mike Loder about their debut indie feature A Little Resistance, the "Moulin Rouge of war films" that's also “Cinderella meets Platoon.”

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Christian and Andrew chat to Melbourne filmmakers Charles Terrier and Mike Loder about their debut indie feature A Little Resistance, the "Moulin Rouge of war films" that's also “Cinderella meets Platoon.”

Click here for Part 2

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After the melancholy vampire story that was Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has delivered an equally meditative human drama with Paterson. It’s a film that shows a week in the life of a lovely artistic couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is an avid painter, designer and cupcake maker, with a distinctive monochromatic colour scheme in everything she makes, and wears, though ironically she is a very colourful character. Her husband, Paterson (Adam Driver), is a gentle poet who drives a bus for a living, and uses all of his break time to write a few lines in his "secret notebook". While Laura sells her wares at the local farmers’ market, where they're very popular, Paterson won't share his work with anyone other than her. For ages, she's been telling them he should get his poems published, or at the very least make copies of them. Eventually he promises to photocopy them all on the weekend, on one of those last two days that the film shows.

This is hardly a movie that runs on suspense, mostly it's an episodic musing on the little things in life, but there are still a few little narrative arcs that are given a nice payoff. One of these is the question of whether he'll keep that promise in time. Unlike Laura, who shares a piece of her creativity everywhere she goes, Paterson is just happy to watch the world go by. Laura is the one with all the latest gadgets, while Paterson doesn't even have a mobile phone. He's content to just let it all come and go, just like his poems, and his passengers of course. As you’d expect, he hears all sorts of things when he’s eavesdropping at the wheel. People have some very amusing conversations when it looks like no one is listening. There’s plenty of shots of him smirking at them while looking at the road, but these snippets never really make their way into his poems. That would have been too predictable, and far too neat. He mostly writes about what he sees at home, or at the park where he eats his lunch every day. Adam Driver’s voiceover readings of these poems are pleasingly unpolished. Paterson doesn’t sound like he’s reciting them for an audience, he really does sound like he’s writing the words as they come to him.

Jarmusch only overstretches believability when it comes to the couple’s dog, Marvin. He’s certainly adorable, but Jarmusch can’t seem to decide if he wants him to be an anthropomorphised animal character, like Gromit, or a projection of whatever the human characters are going through. It might have been more effective to just let him be a dog, another part of Paterson’s world that he can silently take in.

Paterson is very much a quiet observer who’s surrounded by some very vocal characters. His boss, Donny (Rizwan Manji) is one of those people who likes to answer with complete honesty when someone asks him how he is. Paterson’s favourite bar is also frequented by an actor named Everett (William Jackson Harper) and his ex-girlfriend, Marie, (Chasten Harmon) who Everett can’t seem to let go of and to whom he won’t stop making melodramatic professions of his undying love.

While these figures encourage Paterson to come out of his shell a little and make his mark on the world, they’re never called upon to transform him. Jarmusch isn’t interested in showing how an introvert can turn into an extrovert. Instead, he shows how it’s possible for someone so quiet to navigate a world where it’s survival of the loudest and still remain true to themself.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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The Founder is screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s scathing portrait of Roy Kroc, the eponymous creator of the McDonald’s Corporation, not to be confused with the McDonald brothers who created, well, McDonald’s. If that sounds as all suss it’s probably because it was. Kroc, as written by Siegel, and played by Michael Keaton, is a shameless anti-hero, an opportunistic businessman who listens more to his motivational tapes than he does to his own conscience, if indeed he has one. The film follows his great ascent (or descent, depending on how you look at it) from a not-so-humble milkshake-mixer merchant to the owner of a giant plagiarised franchise. He’s that kind of smarmy fourth-wall-breaking capitalist who is usually the smartest person in the room. However, Siegel, and director John Lee Hancock, both suggest he might simply be the most “persistent” person working in the food industry, since one of his favourite tapes tells him that neither genius nor talent can ever be a substitute for persistence. In his mind, persisting seems to mean sacrificing your integrity and your personal relationships for money.

This is exactly why Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), an honest pair of farmers, chose to abandon their first ill-fated attempt at franchising the business. When Kroc first suggests that they give it another go, they tell him they’d rather run one quality restaurant than fifty mediocre ones, especially since that first one in San Bernardino took them decades to build. While the brothers see their popular “Speedee Service System” as a wholesome masterwork of efficiency, Kroc sees it as a cash cow to be fattened, reproduced and milked for all its worth. Still, Mac thinks that Kroc can do a much better job of the expansion than they did, and Dick thinks that with the right contract he can safely keep Kroc on a leash. Even for those who don’t already know the story, there’s never any doubt how horribly this will end for the brothers. After all, Dick and Mac will always be looking out for each other and their legacy on top of the financial state of the business, while Kroc ticks all the boxes for a character who’s only looking out for himself and his bank account.

The most obvious of these, for an ambitious middle-aged man, is the routine long-suffering wife, played here by Laura Dern. A memorable quote from her character in Wild (2014) pretty well sums up much of her recent career: “I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life.” Especially in films like 99 Homes (from the same year) Dern has often played women who’ve had the men in their life make choices for them. Despite her being an incredibly supportive partner, The Founder shows Roy going behind her back to cancel their club memberships, disown their friendship group, mortgage their house, and ensure that she gets no part of McDonald’s Incorporated when he finally divorces her. Her submissiveness throughout most of this makes her one of the least interesting of these characters that Dern has played in recent years, but she makes it work well enough.

Still, she’s definitely not as engaging as Kroc’s second wife, Joan (Linda Cardellini), who Kroc courts when she’s still married to one of his new buyers. Once he’s stolen her away, and bought off the McDonald brothers as cheaply as he could, he quite literally has everything he’s ever wanted. By this point, every single character goal that Siegel sets up for him has been achieved (Given that this a true story, I don’t think this counts as a spoiler). For some reason, the last shot is of his big new bedroom mirror, which he looks into tearfully before going outside with Joan. I never took this character to be the crying type, but I hope they were tears of some twisted joy. If that was meant to be some sudden moment of feeling empty, remorseful or self-reflective, it was far too late to bring that in. The Founder might be a true story, but it’s hardly a human story. It’s actually quite cerebral and subversive in the way it questions the myth of the American dream. It’s essentially a cautionary tale against large scale enterprise, especially when Kroc starts comparing those big yellow McDonald’s arches to the Christian cross, and by extension suggesting that capitalism is America’s new religion, with franchise outlets as the new churches. This link is drawn even more strongly given that last year Keaton starred in Spotlight, the rather forgettable Best Picture winner about the corruption inside the Catholic Church. In its own way, The Founder is an even more chilling and timely reminder of what you can get away with once you have enough money and real estate to bury your crimes under.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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Threadbare

Featuring: Fipe Preuss, Elnaz Sheshgelani and Phillipa Russell

Choreographer: Kathleen Gonzales

Producer: Natasha Jynel

Threadbare is a three-part multidisciplinary show that celebrates the diversity of Australian identity through dance, poetry and visual art.

The show is presented in languages including English, Spanish, Tongan, Arabic and Auslan.

Threadbare invites audiences to shift their perspectives and open their eyes with ideas that challenge convention in modern Australian society.

It brings together artists from diverse backgrounds to explore the commonalities of human experience.  

Each artist brings a personal reflection and identity to the show.

In Threadbare, there is poetry featuring Dr Quinn Eades exploring feminist, queer and trans series of the body. His poem The Urge to Speak encourages gender queer people to find a voice.

What does it mean to be in contemporary Australia? How do our languages, culture, heritage and traditions connect us?

As a society, the most difficult thing is to look at ourselves and to ask ourselves what work is still needed to foster healing an inclusion.

Threadbare explores the conflict between the “otherness” and belonging in contemporary Australia.

The show also features Phillipa Russell, the only deaf actress in the show.

Phillipa’s solo is performed entirely in Auslan and alludes to the theme of arriving into an unknown country.

She performs of a curious bystander who arrives in a land inhabited by Indigenous peoples – a young white woman who arrives on the scene completely not knowing what’s going on.

The show begins with the steady sound of a heartbeat, which leaves the audience wondering what will happen next.

The atmosphere felt strangely chaotic, as the entire room is engulfed in darkness, and two women slowly appear dressed in white robes with their faces concealed, chanting an interpretation of Welcome to Country.

Written by Caroline Tung

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