Tim Milfull is a Brisbane-based film critic whose work has appeared in print, online, on radio and on television, and who regularly judges documentaries and feature films at film festivals around the world. He teaches film theory and creative writing in the creative industries faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, and is currently completing his PhD in creative writing. Tim recently finished a long-term stint as editor of the popular culture website media-culture reviews, writes for Rave Magazine, and has been contributing to The Independent since 2002.
I had high hopes for Stephan Elliott’s new film, A Few Best Men, resolutely defending him against a fellow critic who had little time for the trailer. Yes, there was a vintage whiff of 1980’s smut franchise Porky’s, but the trailer also had enough funny moments to show promise; and the screenwriter, Dean Craig wrote the hilarious 2007 film, Death at a Funeral, so there was another reason to be hopeful.(Craig also was responsible for the instantly forgettable, mostly African-American remake of Death at a Funeral, but I won’t say anything if you promise not to).
After bidding farewell to his backpacking lover in Tuvalu, David (Xavier Samuel) heads back to his dreary flat in London to announce to his best mates that he is getting married. Loudmouth Tom (Kris Marshall), hopeless dork Graham (Kevin Bishop), and recently cuckolded sadsack Luke (Tim Draxl) are initially gobsmacked, but eventually rally around their mate and agree to fly to Australia for the nuptials.
On arrival in Sydney—we can identify the city because the Opera House is in the background of the establishing shot, while a surfboard with a massive, bloodstained sharkbite floats in the foreground—the boys meet David’s fiancé, Mia (Laura Brent), and a retinue of bodyguards and advisors who work for her right-wing squatter father, Senator Jim Ramme (Jonathan Biggins).
All the elements are here for some hilarity, and there are some very amusing moments, particularly those involving the painfully lonely, drug-dealing psychopath, Ray (Steve Le Marquand). But the chief problem with A Few Best Men is that everything about the film is barely paper-thin, from the specious plot to the unsympathetic and unbelievable characters. Such drawbacks could be forgiven in the presence of some effective comedic moments, but these are few and far between. I’ll have to defer to the better judgement of my critic mate who wrote the film off on the basis of the trailer.
Another unabashed celebration of cinema’s evolution, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist moves a few decades on from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo which lauded the career of the great French film innovator, Georges Méliès.
Where Scorsese focused on Méliès’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of the Lumiere Brothers’ moving picture, Hazanavicius concentrates on the turbulent transition faced by many in the industry when technology allowed filmmakers to move from silent films to talkies.
By the late 1920s, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) has had an astonishingly successful career as a Hollywood heartthrob, starring in a series of cliffhanger-strewn hits as a dashing spy alongside his faithful mutt (Uggie).
When his producer, Al Zimmer (John Goodman) announces the arrival of the talking film, however, Valentin laughingly dismisses the innovation as a fleeting novelty. Stubbornly setting off on his own to produce a hit film, Valentin is increasingly dismayed to see his drop-dead gorgeous former extra, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) exceed his own stardom, as she becomes one of the first talkie superstars.
But The Artist doesn’t simply hark back to a distant era in the faithful manner of Australian director, Rolf de Heer’s Dr. Plonk, for Hazanavicius plays with our expectations of silent film, embracing the traditions of the form and experimenting with the possibilities that the talkies brought to filmmakers; in particular, I’m referring here to Valentin’s nightmarish impressions of the technique, and even the final moments of the film, which offer a deliciously subtle hint as to why the actor might have had trouble keeping his career afloat, even if he had accepted talkies.
In The Artist, Hazanavicius and his collaborators joyously celebrate the wonder and endless potential of cinema. Surely only the hardest, most cynical of critics—like the misguided Kim Novak, who accused the filmmakers of “raping” her body of work after hearing strains of the score from Vertigo in The Artist, would begrudge plaudits for this film.
By rights, a biopic about the United States’s ultimate G-man, J. Edgar Hoover, should have been easy pickings; for all his faults, Hoover was quite an amazing twentieth-century figure.
Forged in the Justice Bureau’s vicious 1920s battles with Bolsheviks who had no hesitation in using extreme violence to advance their cause, the young agent was acknowledged as a rising star for his enthusiasm for new sciences like fingerprinting and forensics, and rewarded for his successful prosecutions with ever more illustrious promotions that led to widening freedom in designing his own innovative Federal Bureau of Investigations.
But behind the scenes, Hoover was a cruel, paranoid bigot with peccadilloes that rivalled the bulging files that he compiled to blackmail the power-mongers who financed him, and any public figure unfortunate enough to catch his obsessive gaze.
In the hands of one of the most talented living Hollywood directors, Clint Eastwood, risk-taking screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the biopic, Milk and many episodes of the Mormon-busting television series Big Love, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Naomi Watts, J. Edgar should be almost bullet-proof at the box office.
What a shame then, that Eastwood’s film ends up being a gloomy, turgidly plotted narrative that features some of the most ludicrous make-up in cinematic history. DiCaprio’s impressions of Hoover alternate between awe-inspiring and downright silly when his prosthetics leave Hoover looking like he had succumbed to some of the first experiments with Botox; while his ageing lover, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) prompted outright guffaws in our screening with his palsied, plasticine face and excruciatingly laboured acting.
Ann Brunswick
Mungo MacCallum
Tim Milfull
David Bray
Ivor Thurston
Don Gordon Brown
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