Table of contents for No. 183 in Metro

It’s 2014. I’ve been conducting interviews for Metro for over ten years. A last-minute reassignment sees me handling the new Spierig Brothers thriller, Predestination. This is good news. I loved their first feature, Undead (2003), and although their sophomore effort Daybreakers (2009) had its flaws, it certainly didn’t lack ambition. If they’ve managed to adapt Robert A Heinlein’s 1959 short story ‘—All You Zombies—’ successfully, then Predestination could be a corker. I sit down to watch the film with my wife. She’s got no idea what it’s about, so I’m determined not to give anything away. It’s 2003. I’m heading in to my first interview for a magazine called Metro. I’ve never done an interview before, and frankly I’m a little worried. I’m talking to the directors of Undead, two…

Around the Block, written and directed by Sarah Spillane, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013. Made with the support of Screen Australia’s Producer Offset, it’s an Australian–US co-production that boasts an American Hollywood star (Christina Ricci) and introduces a relatively unknown Australian actor (Hunter Page-Lochard).1 It also features a strong supporting cast of Australian actors including Jack Thompson, Daniel Henshall and Damian Walshe-Howling. With a reputable Australian sales agent (Arclight Films) and distributor (Pinnacle Films) attached, it is, theoretically, a sellable film. But Around the Block just couldn’t secure a traditional theatrical release. Before sentencing it to a DVD, Blu-ray and video-on-demand (VOD) release, Spillane and the film’s producers decided to host a handful of one-off event screenings across cinemas in Sydney, Canberra and…

Oliver Pfeiffer: Can you explain the idea behind The Little Death (2014)? Josh Lawson: I felt that we hadn’t really tackled sex in Australian film before in a way that was funny, interesting and romantic, so I thought there was a gap in the market for it. I remember being at a dinner party where we were talking about fetishes and sex. We were laughing and we were shocked as people were admitting things that were kind of private and naughty. I just thought all these emotions – this cheekiness and laughter – if I could put all of that into a movie then we’d have something. Sex really is that great subject where you’re able to find all those emotions […] and that’s what I…

Taking its premise from real-life cases of flesh served as food at a remote Iranian restaurant, Fish & Cat (Shahram Mokri, 2013) commences in the manner of many a horror film. Two menacing middle-aged men, Babak (Babak Karimi) and Saeed (Saeed Ebrahimifar), mosey from their isolated abode, encroaching on the orbit of innocent visitors. Alongside others ostensibly aligned with them – one-armed twins (Nima and Pouya Shahrabi), an arguing gatekeeper (Alireza Esapoor) and their boss, Hamid (Khosrow Shahraz) – they represent sinister forces pitched against babes stranded in their perilous woods. The audience awaits the carnage the scenario promises, anticipating the confrontation and the killing customarily mandated by the horror genre. Alas, the catharsis of decisive revelation never comes to fruition; instead, it is the cunning absence of definitive answers…

Tracey Moffatt’s seventeen-minute, 35mm film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) catapulted the director onto the international stage. Born out of a distinct aesthetic vision and confidence as a marked departure from the documentary-realist representations of Aboriginality that had characterised Australian mainstream filmmaking up until its year of release, Moffatt’s film can be understood as a juncture between a host of traditions in Australian landscape painting, particularly that of Albert Namatjira, in Hollywood melodrama, and in avant-garde production and sound design and cinematic acts of telling ghost stories. Tracey Moffatt Moffatt is a singular figure in both Australian and international art scenes. She is a photographer, filmmaker, installation artist and music video director. She has always asserted that, from an early age, she was fascinated with ‘popular cinema and the…

In his seminal essay on gay male sex in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, Leo Bersani writes that gay men run the risk of idealizing and feeling inferior to certain representations of masculinity on the basis of which they are in fact judged and condemned. The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies.1 Although Bersani’s concerns were around the politics of masculinity and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on gay men in 1980s America, his comments regarding gay male sexual identity continue to have currency today. Gay men have historically been tied to the feminine (‘sissies’, ‘pansies’, passivity) and are thus understood as different from their straight male counterparts – Bersani has famously encapsulated…

What is the value of truth? This is the question at the heart of Felony (2013), an evocative Australian film that investigates that single moment that can change the course of a person’s life forever. ‘We started thinking of it as a psychological thriller,’ explains director Matthew Saville, ‘but now that the film is made, I think of it as a philosophical one.’ Felony begins with an emergency phone call. We hear Mal Toohey (Joel Edgerton), a detective, asking for an ambulance – his voice hesitates; he’s panicked. There’s an unconscious child on the road. What Mal doesn’t mention in his version of events – neither during the phone call nor, later, in his official statement – is that he hit the child himself, on his drive home from a…

Australian sitcoms are funny things. Except when they’re not, which is often. Pick a workplace to fictionalise, hire a few comedians to try their hand at acting, and shoot the end result in a handheld, cod-mockumentary style. Quicker than you can say, ‘Thank god you’re here,’ you’ve got yourself a show. Very Small Business, The Hollowmen, The Librarians. From the shoulder pads of Frontline to the sexual-assault murals of Summer Heights High, the formula has never really shifted. But what happens if you break the mould? And I mean really break it. Maybe even chase down the person who made it and give them a stern talking to. Hire actors to play comedy rather than the other way around. Ditch the workplace and get yourself a family unit. Give the…

Wong Kar Wai’s nebulous auteurist brand as Hong Kong’s man in the sunglasses has long threatened to overwhelm his films themselves. After the seemingly effortless pop-cool of his 1990s streak, he became an international darling of the Miramax set, but enthusiasm cooled to some extent following his ambitious – some might say overblown – 2046 (2004). His disastrous English-language debut, My Blueberry Nights (2007), proved that Wong’s self-consciously poetic, stilted dialogue and hip alienation failed to survive being transplanted from a Central food court to an American diner. Subsequently, gestating amid his most protracted stretch between feature films (although he wasn’t inactive, working on segments for anthology films along with high-profile advertisements), the long-rumoured The Grandmaster finally opened in mainland China in early 2013 and belatedly arrived in Australian cinemas…

Lung cancer […] I’m not ready for it yet. I’ve got heaps to go for. So that’s why I’m staying positive. I’ll try and beat it best I can. – Nigel Slater, volunteer caretaker, Port Kembla Community Project Nigel’s voice is coarse and his sentences are broken by long pauses as he recalls the day of his diagnosis. At fifty-eight years old, the retiree is in the centre of his community, donating much of his time to the Port Kembla Community Project (PKCP) as caretaker and an active member of the Men’s Group. But on the day his doctor told him he may not live, he was alone. ‘Then I told my sister. And then the tears came. Like now.’ The camera traces an intimate close-up of his face as…

If truth is stranger than fiction, then it follows that reality is more horrific than anything that can be imagined. The situations inventive minds fashion from their fears bound forth with the freedom of impossibility, eliciting superficial bumps and jumps, whereas the misfortune and misery of life – as alternately malicious and mundane as it can be – strikes terror into even the hardest of hearts, not through vividness but in its veracity. On a visceral level, fleeing from a monster, dodging a sadistic killer and avoiding exaggerated physical harm get pulses racing. On an existential level, wasting away in a meaningless life, being cruelly cast aside because of difference, and lacking agency over your own decisions are much more frightening. Wang Bing, perhaps China’s foremost long-form documentarian, understands the…

Faced with the dwindling popularity of its horror villains in the 1930s and 1940s, Universal Pictures decided that, if Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolf Man1 could no longer scare people, then maybe they could make them laugh. And so, in a bit of brand-building betraying the Barnumesque spirit of early Hollywood – and showing that, contrary to popular thinkpiece hand-wringing, modern marketing stunts like AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Paul WS Anderson, 2004) aren’t symbols of Hollywood’s inexorable decline – Universal matched its classic horror stable with another studio cash cow: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (Charles T Barton, 1948). It marked the end of the golden era of early horror movies – with once-feared icons of fright rendered as comic fodder – the symbolism lingering in…

Kasimir Burgess’ debut feature film, Fell (2014), is a tense evocation of trauma and catharsis organised around the recurring image of growth. The film begins with an idyllic camping trip in the Yarra Valley shared by Thomas (Matt Nable) and his daughter, Lara (Isabella Garwoli). When the young girl wanders alone onto a winding road through the bush, a passing logging truck brakes too slowly to avoid hitting her. During the impact, a log jumps clear off the back of the truck and falls into the dense undergrowth. Thomas runs out of the forest screaming for help, but the driver, Luke (Daniel Henshall), speeds on. Some years later, the paths of these two men converge again as they become members of the same logging crew. Thomas, racked with sorrow, now…

It is tempting to view the popularity of television crime programs supposedly based on real events as a recent phenomenon. The most obvious local evidence for this is the incredible success of the Underbelly franchise. Aired in 2008, its first season dramatised Melbourne’s gangland war of the 1990s and early 2000s and spawned a succession of shows depicting the exploits of various contemporary and historical criminals.1 Police work and crime have also become a staple of Australian reality TV fare, as seen in the recent shows Highway Patrol and Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. Arguably, our less violent, more affluent society reacts to the thrill presented by true-crime television drama. The shows allow us – from the comfort and anonymity of our lounge rooms – to revel in their rough,…

Although the specifics have evolved across the years, the post-apocalyptic subgenre is one that calls to mind a set of firmly entrenched tropes and an easily identifiable visual aesthetic. From Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) to The Rover (David Michôd, 2014), there have been few real efforts to shake up what we expect to see in ‘the world after it ends’. But we do see such an attempt in Wastelander Panda, which features a six-foot anthropomorphic panda wandering around the South Australian outback. Wastelander Panda is a web-based live-action series developed by Adelaide-based production company Epic Films and revolves around the young human girl Rose (Mandahla Rose1 ) as she searches for Arcayus (Marcus McKenzie, voiced by Roger Newcombe), a reclusive humanoid panda, after the murder of his brother and…

The dynamic growth of transnational connections during the first decade of this century brought Bollywood cinema unprecedented international exposure and prominence. The development of media and communications technologies, the steady growth of production facilities, more distribution and exhibition networks, and the continual presence of Indian titles on the international film-festival circuit have all created new conditions for the production, distribution and consumption of Bollywood films. In June 2014, students of Swinburne University of Technology’s Advanced Diploma of Screen and Media (Film and Television) spent two weeks on a study tour in Mumbai as part of the Australian Government’s AsiaBound program, with the help of the India Study Abroad Center (ISAC). Two months later, Bollywood director Hansal Mehta visited Swinburne for a screening of his film Shahid (2013) and a subsequent…