Flix in the Wet
Welcome to Flix in the Wet 2017!
Happy New Year to all our members and
supporters. We hope you are enjoying the
glorious Wet! The Programming Committee
members have put together some additional
words and background to our Flix in the Wet
choices.
We are trying a new venue in the last 2 weeks –
The first seven weekends will be at BCC where we
have screened for over ten years. While it has
some positive aspects, with the option of digital
projection at the Entertainment Centre we
thought it is worth a trial… We look forward to
your feedback at the conclusion!
Julieta
Perhaps it’s the moderating influence of the
source material, three stories by Canada’s Nobel
laureate Alice Munro, which the master
writer/director has woven into one screenplay
and relocated to his native Spain.
The film’s long flashback portion, and most
serious Hitchcock adoration, as a punk-haired
younger Julieta, travels by train across the
Spanish countryside. The journey seems ominous,
given the Vertigo-inflected score of Alberto
Iglesias.
Like Volver and Talk to Her and Bad Education the
plot unfolds in nonlinear fashion, lurching forward
and back through time to reveal the family
melodrama in full review, an emotional labyrinth
that becomes thornier but more engrossing as it
progresses.
It is set in the late 1980s and Jean-Claude Larrieu's
cinematography captures the period with bright,
colourful charm: the deep reds, the brilliant blues,
the frizzled blondness of Julieta's post-punk
haircut. - Neil
With his new psychodrama Julieta, Pedro
Almodóvar pays homage to women and to the
suspense master Alfred Hitchcock: not at all for
the first time but never before with such evident
deliberation.
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Neon Demon
The film follows Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old
ingénue who moves to a seedy motel in Pasadena,
run by a sleazy and sinister manager played by a
cast-against-type Keanu Reeves. In a way, this
film is a perfect example of form following
function. What better way to show how empty
and perverse the model scene in Los Angeles is,
than to make an empty and perverse movie about
it. Nicolas Winding Refn wanted to make this
point, he has made it loud and clear. Neon Demon
is visually stunning as you would expect from a
Refn film who directed Drive and Bronson
Checco is born on the privileged side of life in an
Italian small town, with a guaranteed job as a
public servant. When a new reformist
government vows to cut down on bureaucracy,
Checco is forced to accept worsening conditions.
It does a great job caricaturing the profile of the
natural born public worker, who aspires nothing
more than a post in public office and the security
that comes with it - even if it means being sent to
the North Pole or Africa.
Some of the audiences probably won't really
appreciate its very droll mix of violence,
cannibalism, dark comedy, necrophilia and
fetishism.
“I make fun of something that is obvious – we
Italians are a people who are reluctant to
change,” Luca Medici who wrote the script and
played the main character, said in a magazine
interview.
Although Neon Demon is ostensibly a horror film,
underneath all the scary movie trappings lies a
very black (and bleak) comedy about a superficial
world where appearances are everything and the
only way to survive is to embrace (quite literally)
a dog-eat-dog attitude. - Neil
It uses Nordic cultures to contrast traditional
Italian values, and how the world is changing, and
what is politically correct, versus what older
generations expected.
Where am I Going? (Quo Vado?)
This was the most popular comedy in Italy in
2016…. and several of my friends from other
states have really loved it – very sound feedback
so we are expecting large crowds! - Di
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A refreshing break from Hollywood based humour
and mindset, you have to be a passionate worker
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vs the more plain joy de vivre that celebrates life,
and does not need work to justify their existence.
- Neil
This is sure to be popular so get your tickets early!
Queen of Katwe
This is the latest film from director Mira Nair
whose previous films, Mississippi Masala and
Salaam Bombay screened at the Deckchair. She
returns to her native Uganda for this film.
The performances are uniformly good, especially
given that most of them are child actors (Mira
Nair's first film was Salaam Bombay and she is
pretty good at handling children). I found the end
credits rather moving, where the real characters
pose with the actors who played them on screen.
All in all a very warm, watchable film. - Neil
Lo and Behold - Reveries of the Connected
World
Society depends on the Internet for nearly
everything but rarely do we step back and
recognize its endless intricacies and unsettling
omnipotence. From the brilliant mind of Werner
Herzog comes his newest vehicle for exploration,
a playful yet chilling examination of our rapidly
interconnecting online lives.
Queen of Katwe is set in the slums of Uganda. Nair
doesn't attempt to go easy on the slum visuals
here. The filth and squalor are in your face here,
from beginning to end. I haven't seen a film
depicting poverty in this way for a long time. Even
Slumdog Millionaire wasn't so strong. Otherwise
Queen of Kawate is a fairly predictable story of an
under-privileged girl rising to success against the
odds. The medium of her rise is chess. She's the
pawn who turns into a queen, as sometimes
happens in chess.
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Herzog documents a treasure trove of interviews
of strange and beguiling individuals—ranging
from Internet pioneers to victims of wireless
radiation, whose anecdotes and reflections
weave together a complex portrait of our brave
new world. Herzog describes the Internet as “one
of the biggest revolutions we as humans are
experiencing,” and yet he tempers this
enthusiasm with horror stories from victims of
online harassment and Internet addiction.
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Jane got a Gun
In spite of many difficulties, (importantly, Scottish
director Lynne Ramsay left just before filming
began, and some of the main actors pulled out
because of delays) the PC considered this film well
worth including because of its focus on a woman
in the main role and a variation of the popular
Western genre. - Di
For all of its detailed analysis, this documentary
also wrestles with profound and intangible
questions regarding the Internet’s future. Will it
dream, as humans do, of its own existence? Can it
discover the fundamentals of morality, or perhaps
one day understand the meaning of love? Or will
it soon cause us—if it hasn’t already—more harm
than good?
The shape of things to come is a subject very dear
to the hearts of the high-tech evangelists Herzog
talks to, and it accounts for the pulse of freakish
comedy that beats through “Lo and Behold.”
Anthony Lane New Yorker
‘Really smart people talking about scary things.
Only Herzog could have made this movie.’ A local
viewer
We have loved Herzog’s films for decades and
watch with great interest his evolution as a film
maker and the way his focus changes with new
technologies. - Di
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“Jane Got a Gun is a rare contemporary attempt
to make a straightforward Western. The dialogue
is tough and terse and while it may lack the
brilliantly obscene poetry of the likes of “The
Hateful Eight,” it certainly sounds more like what
actual people might have said to each other in real
life. The performances are good as well—Joel
Edgerton (who co-wrote the screenplay) is strong
as the man who finds himself in the position of
saving the woman who broke his heart and the
man who he believes took her from him. Portman
overcomes the initial absurdity of her presenceshe is not exactly what one might consider to be
the epitome of frontier womanhood - to give a
convincing turn as a woman who is strong enough
to defend herself to a point, and smart enough to
know when to seek help from others. Ewen
McGregor slips into his villain role so skilfully that
it might take some viewers a couple of scenes to
realize that it is him. And while it is not the kind of
Western with six-guns blazing in every scene, the
climactic siege at the Hammond ranch is nicely
executed as well.” - Roger Ebert
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The Age of Shadows
Korean spy thriller The Age of Shadows may have
the same basic plot as a "Zapata western," the
kind of spaghetti western that follows an amoral
mercenary who gets transformed into a
committed revolutionary by a tight-knit group of
freedom fighters.
But writer-director Kim Jee-woon's gripping
1920s period piece isn't just an homage to older
sceptic — through warm front-lighting, intimate
medium close-ups, and cheekbone-highlighting
makeup.
movies, even if it never goes anywhere you don't
expect it to. Kim makes you care about selfish
police chief Jung-chool's conversion into a bombslinging dissident by emphasizing circumstantial
peril over psychological realism. - Simon Abrams,
the Village Voice
Viewers learn everything they need to know
about the Korean collaborator, who's working
with the Japanese government to capture
resistance leader Che-san in the midst of
exceptionally well-choreographed chases and
tense dialogue exchanges.
There's also a wealth of character detail in
relatively low-key conversations, particularly
Jung-chool's first meeting with stoic rebel Woojin. In a couple of minutes, Kim establishes these
two protagonists' fundamental differences —
Woo-jin is an optimist, while Jung-chool is a
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Kim also subtly draws attention to body language
and interpersonal chemistry during climactic
action scenes, like a three-way standoff set in a
cramped luxury train's dining car.
You may have seen parts of The Age of
Shadows before, but they're rarely this well
assembled.
Moonlight
“It's impossible to pinpoint exactly how Barry
Jenkins's Moonlight gets inside your head and
makes you see the world with new eyes. But it
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does – and then it owns you. This is a gamechanger…” – Rolling Stone
million, it was nominated for 6 Golden Globe
awards, winning Best Motion Picture Drama, and
is predicted to be in the running for an Oscar.
Don’t miss it at Flix! - Laura
Joe Cinque’s Consolation
"How many recent Australian drama films strike
us as evocatively moody, eerily disquieting,
rigorously intelligent, and fluently cinematic?
Sotiris Dounoukos achieves all this in Joe Cinque's
Consolation, a subtle tour de force of complex
characters captured in their social environment."
– Adrian Martin
Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is one of the year’s most
critically acclaimed films. Told in three parts by
three different actors, it follows the life of Chiron,
an African American boy growing into a man,
struggling with his sexuality and surviving in a
world of poverty, violence and homophobia.
Chiron’s story begins in the Miami projects, where
he lives with his drug addicted mother and is
intensively bullied, finding unusual friendship and
reprieve in the home of a local drug dealer. The
film then shadows Chiron into a lonely
adolescence which leads to a violent act of
revenge, and finally meets him ten years later as
a drastically hardened adult.
The film is an adaptation of the short stage play In
the Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, by Tarell
Alvin McCraney. It is a unique exploration of
queerness, race and the search for identity and
love. Made on a very modest budget of US$5
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Based on Helen Garner's acclaimed 2004 book of
the same name, Joe Cinque's Consolation is a
dramatic retelling of one of Australia's most
infamous murders that took place in Canberra in
the 1990s.
Joe Cinque, an engineering student died after his
girlfriend, Anu Singh, sedated and then
deliberately administered a fatal heroin overdose.
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What fascinates in this bizarre true crime story is
not that Cinque’s murder occurred, but that it was
able to occur at all. Singh was a law student at the
Australian National University when she started
dating Cinque in 1994. Sometime later, mentally
unwell and given to histrionic fantasies of
persecution and illness, Singh began talking about
suicide to her friends. As Singh’s plans grew
darker and more sinister, she started hinting she
would take someone with her. In late 1997, Singh
made plans to kill her boyfriend Cinque after
throwing a series of macabre farewell dinner
parties. The dinner guests, most of them
university students, had heard various rumours
about her plan, but nobody warned Cinque. Joe
Cinque's death and the subsequent trial drew the
attention of the whole country, as the broader
community struggled to come terms with how a
life could fall through so many hands.
Driven by an impressive performance in her
feature debut by Maggie Naouri as the damaged
and dangerously manipulative Singh, Joe Cinque’s
Consolation will appeal to fans of real-life crime
stories. - Elly
Whereas Garner’s book concerned itself with
Singh’s
subsequent
trial,
writer
and
director Sotiris Dounoukos — a Canberra native
who attended the same law school in the same
year as Singh — draws on his own memories of
the law school, the people and the city from this
time, as well as Garner's meticulous research, to
build a compelling psychological study of
community,
culpability
and
collective
responsibility.
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