Reviews

Three parts Gus van Sant's 'Elephant' to one part Gregg Araki's 'Totally F***ed Up', the debut feature from 19 year old director Murali K Thalluri - which replaces a high school massacre with suicide - is a film so derivative that it borders on plagiarism.

This re-creation of Van Sant's 'an ordinary high school day - except that it's not' opened this year's 55th Melbourne International Film Festival to a largely underwhelmed audience.

Key elements such as tracking shots, temporal displacement, soundtrack and cinematography were copied almost verbatim from Van Sant's film.

Awkward dialogue and pacing, coupled with inconsistent performances from the amateur cast, ensured that the majority of the film's plot 'twists' were telegraphed to viewers far too soon.

While the inexperienced young director deserves kudos for financing his debut feature totally independently, the only merit in this earnest, awkward and unoriginal film lies in the fact that it was made at all.

Based on the novel of the same name by Graeme Aitken, and directed by Stewart Main, 50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS is a coming-of-age story set in rural New Zealand in 1979.

Its protagonist is Billy (Andrew Patterson), an overweight and overly-imaginative 12 year old boy main whose passion in life is watching science fiction adventures and reenacting them with his tomboy cousin Lou (Harriet Beatie).

Lou loves rugby; Billy hates the game, a fact which confirms his status as an object of derision among the other local kids. The arrival of the even more awkward Roy (a gangly Jay Collins) at their small regional school changes the pecking order, and provides even Billy with someone that he can bully and belittle. Despite the tension between them, the two boys also embark on early sexual explorations together down by the creek, although neither of them know what a 'poofter' is, and accept the taunts of their peers to that effect in pained innocence.

Complicating matters is another new arrival, Jamie (the charismatic Michael Dorman), a handsome young farmhand working for Billy's father, whose presence becomes the catalyst for tensions that disrupt the shared lives of these three almost-teens.

While 50 WAYS OF SAYING FABULOUS does have merit in its honest exploration of the sexual awakening of a young gay boy on the verge of adolescence, and is occasionally warm and affecting, its narrative is episodic, and its dramatic structure is often contrived. Too, the plodding, unimaginative direction fails to imbue the story with any real tension, although several scenes, especially those shot at night, looked superb, with evocative lighting and composition.

Had its running time been cut back to 45 minutes to an hour, this would have been a stronger film. As it was, its 90 minute duration definitely outstays its welcome.

Based on Annie Proulx's short story of the same name (first published in The New Yorker in 1997) Brokeback Mountain is the latest feature film from Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee, who also directed The Ice Storm, The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It tells the story of 19 year old ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Australian actor Heath Ledger) and young rodeo rider Jack Twist (Donnie Darko's Jake Gyllenhaal), who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on a Wyoming mountainside.

Inarticulate, ill-educated, and already bruised by the harsh lives they have led to date, the youths soon find their forced intimacy developing into a bond that neither is prepared for, and which in the milieu in which they live, is almost unthinkable.

"You know I ain't queer," Ennis tells his companion soon after the drunken night when the two young men first have sex. "Hell, I ain't neither," Jack replies.

Given the brutal real-life murder of gay youth Matthew Shepherd in rural Wyoming more than 30 years later, their reticence to accept the truth at such a time, and in such a place, is more than understandable.

Once the summer is over the two men separate, and in the coming years both marry and struggle to raise their respective families in a series of deft, economic scenes that flesh out many events only briefly alluded to in Proulx's original story. Most notably the screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, have breathed life into the personalities of the women the two men marry: Ennis' hopeful young wife Alma (former Dawson's Creek star Michelle Williams) and the feisty rodeo rider Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). Both women turn in remarkable performances, displaying nuance and subtlety in underplayed roles that perfectly match Ang Lee's deft directorial tone.

Despite the new lives they have built for themselves, Jack and Ennis cannot forget their love for each another. When they reunite four years after first meeting, their brief affair is rekindled into the sort of epic romance that Hollywood myths are made of. Like all great love stories, from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic, it is a romance that, ultimately, results in tragedy.

Unlike most films, which spoon-feed information to their audiences through awkward and expository dialogue, Brokeback Mountain assumes its audience's intelligence, and tells its story largely through glance and gesture. While some might complain that the film lacks passion, as its male leads never once speak the words "I love you," to one another, their longing eyes speak volumes for those who are prepared to look for such messages. Similarly its pace, while slow by the standard of contemporary blockbusters, allows the story time to mature in such a way that its inexorable climax, when it arrives, is devastating.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ensures that the film's lyrical images perfectly contrast its taut structure, while director Ang Lee has coaxed some of the most memorable performances in recent years from his young cast. Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist provides the perfect balance of enthusiasm and bewilderment, while Heath Ledger conveys all the fear, anger and love that his character is unable to express verbally through his tightly-controlled physical performance.

Brokeback Mountain is a masterful example of film-making, presenting a story and characters that will haunt you long after the movie has ended. Although the insecure and the ignorant will dismiss it as 'a gay cowboy movie,' the tale it tells is universal, and will resonate with anyone, gay or straight, man or woman, who has ever yearned for a love that lay just out of reach. Brokeback Mountain is that rare example of a film in which every separate element combines to form a faultless whole, and I have no hesitation in declaring it one of the first true masterpieces of 21st century cinema.

The culmination of decades of work for writer-director George Lucas, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith completes the epic space-opera sextet which burst onto our screens in 1977, and brings the tragic story of Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker and his transformation into the iconic villain Darth Vader to a close.

The film opens with a battle in the upper atmosphere of the planet Coruscant that sees juggernaut spaceships pitted against tiny fighters, in a deliberate and contrived echo of the opening scene of the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Jedi knights Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) weave their ships through a barrage of explosions and enemy fire, intent on rescuing Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), the political leader of the galactic Republic from the clutches of General Greivous, the wheezing robot leader of the separatist rebels who are threatening to tear the Republic apart.

This spectacular but curiously emotionless beginning sets the action-driven pace of the following 140 minutes of the film, which abandons the laborious political intrigue established in Episodes I and II in favour of almost constant combat between an array of characters and alien races.

The streamlined plot takes in the doomed romance between ambitious Anakin and his wife, Senator Padmé Amildala (a bored-looking Natalie Portman), Palpatine's betrayal of the Republic, and the long-anticipated but unconvincing moment when Anakin swears allegiance to the dark side of the Force.

While Lucas delights in visual spectacle throughout Revenge of the Sith, overall the film lacks any real dramatic tension or sense of menace, even in the fight scenes, which should have us on the edge of our seats. Partially this is caused by the fact that we already know the outcome: we know how history is shaped out by the events which are fated to unfold in this film, and so the film lacks suspense. Equally critical however is the fact that it's hard to muster any concern over CGI animations, no matter how seamlessly they are blended with the real actors appearing beside them on-screen.

The resulting film is strangely passionless, a situation not helped by the lack of chemistry between romantic leads Christensen and Portman. The script's painfully clumsy dialogue, which manifests in clichéd and emotive outbursts from all the important characters, further exacerbates the film's numerous flaws.

What does work is the film's pace, and the way in which Lucas for the most part adroitly introduces characters, and foreshadows events that are already legendary among legions of Star Wars fans (although the clumsy introduction of Chewbacca the Wookie is jarring to say the least).

Lucas' storytelling skills are at their best during the film's climax, when he adroitly intercuts from the inevitable showdown between Obi-Wan and the newly named Darth Vader on the volcanic planet Mustafar, and Jedi master Yoda's desperate attempts to defeat the evil Palpatine back on Coruscant. That we already know the outcome of these battles is, in these sequences at least, of no concern. The film's final scenes, including the first appearance of the armour-clad Darth Vader and the birth of Padmé's twins Luke and Leia, are more forced, but are sure to satisfy the franchise's many fans.

While suffering many of the same flaws that dogged the previous two instalments of the series, (including at least one major plot hole you could steer a Death Star through: if Anakin is so desperate to save Padme's life that he turns to the dark side, why is he so happy to leave her side to do his master's bidding, instead of obsessively focussing on finding the cure he has been offered by Palpatine?) Revenge of the Sith occasionally comes close to recapturing the grandeur and sense of wonder which made the original Star Wars trilogy so memorable. It is a fitting albeit overdue end to a saga that has entertained so many, for so long.

Asian-American director Gregg Araki's first "heterosexual movie" (as the opening credits declare) is a lurid, drug-fueled romp about teen angst, sex, voyeurism, murder, consumerism and homophobia. It's also a lot of fun, in an ironically kitsch, acquired-taste sort of way.

At the time of its 1995 release The Doom Generation was firmly entrenched as part of the 'new queer cinema' (a movement which sought to break down notions of 'normal' heterosexuality through transgression and subversion rather than through polemic statements). The film sets out to explore a sexual dynamic that lies well outside the traditional boy-meets-girl (or even boy-meets-boy) structure of 99% of American movies, but it does do with its tongue firmly planted in (between) cheek(s).

The plot is extraordinarily simple. Teen couple Amy White (Rose McGowan, best known as small screen witch Paige Matthews from Charmed) and Jordan White (James Duval, more recently seen as Frank in cult film Donnie Darko) accidentally save the seductive, psychotic bisexual Xavier Red (Jonathon Schaech) from a violent gang of homophobes (played by members of industrial band Skinny Puppy) before throwing him out of their car a short time later. The trio meets again later that night at the scene of an accidental convenience store murder, forcing them into an uncomfortable intimacy as they flee the scene of the crime. Before long this intimacy develops significantly, in scenes which display a truly erotic frisson.

The film is deliberately trashy, satirizing western culture's love of consumption and surface beauty while simultaneously commenting on the homophobia underlying traditional macho braggadocio. It's also influenced by such classic genres as the road movie and the horror film, in particular taking the horror movie's obsession with bodily penetration and perverse sexuality (as typified by the likes of Alien and The Fly) to occasionally shocking extremes.

With its garish, adolescent energy and deft ear for teen culture's dialog and self-obsessed behavior, not to mention a too-cool-for-school soundtrack of mid-90's alternative bands (as well as a cameo by Janes's Addiction's Perry Farrell among others), Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation is an occasionally infuriating but wildly entertaining sex-murder romp whose ending is all the more powerful for the light tone the film has previously employed.

RICHARD WATTS