I have always had mixed feelings about Australian movies; there have been some great Australian movies made, but…

First, reviewers have a tendency to always give positive reviews to Australian films (out of some sense of loyalty I assume) but this means that the review loses its primary function – distinguishing between good and bad films. If I can no longer rely on reviewers to give a pointer to the quality of a whole class of films, then it is easier to just avoid that class in its entirety.

Second, and I don’t know if it is a function of the funding system, but it seems sometimes like only two types of films get made in Australia, films set in the outback, or films set in the grimy streets of western Sydney/Melbourne.

Take, for example, this recently release film, Cedar Boys, reviewed on the Movie Show:

In CEDAR BOYS, Tarek, LES CHANTERY, a Lebanese-Australian, lives with his parents and little sister in Sydney’s western suburbs…

And I stopped reading there.

The Duchess came out last year and the plot of the movie seemed to be about some young lady in the 18th century who wears nice frocks and marries some member of the landed gentry and gets upset because she is meant to have babies and he is in charge.

A female friend found all this quite moving, and I must admit I found, not so much the movie itself (which I have no intention of seeing), but rather the reaction to it a bit annoying.

I couldn’t really pin down my basis of my feelings until I saw an article in the Washington Post: Michael Dirda on ‘Mrs. Woolf and the Servants’. A room of one’s own — and someone to clean it. The book examines the relationship between Virginia Woolfe and her servant. Yes she had a number of female servants. Woolfe was a feminist for herself but happy to receive servitude from her fellow women.

!8th century society was established on class based oppression. The life of some frocked minor royal was irrelevant in that system of oppression. In fact she was far, far better off than most; due to her wealth. If she really cared about oppression she would have been campaigning for the working class poor and not for herself on minor issue (gee, her husband had a mistress, how terrible for her, as she sits in her silk gown eating strawberries).

SBS played an old science fiction movie, Outland on TV last night. This is a kind of space western staring Sean Connery.

The interesting thing that struck me while watching the show was the way future technology was presented in the film. While there were aspects that were obviously ‘futuristic’, such as the location on the moon Io and the space suits, there were aspects that were not so futuristic but rather quite ‘of the time’ (1981).

One was the very seventies LED style displays:

Also of its time was the green screen computer display:

The computer paper was also an interesting addition. This type of paper would hardly be recognised by young kids today, the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers it was used with have all but disappeared.

There would appear to be a couple of reasons were using this technology in the film, the most obvious one being the very technological constraints of the show. The production of futuristic buildings and environments is relatively simple through modelling and filming effects, the more specific technology is more difficult to reproduce. What does a futuristic computer look like, and in any case how do you create one?

The other reason is more cultural. At the time, certain technology was considered ‘cutting edge’ and ‘modern’, for example personal computers and LED time displays. For a movie trying to show its futuristic setting, it is actually easier to use contemporary technology that is familiar to the audience than trying to invent a futuristic that may be unrecognisable as such to the audience.

This also explains the computer paper. Nothing says future technology in 1981 more than computer paper, even if thought about logically it is unlikely to be used a hundred years in the future.

Into the Wild is directed by Sean Penn and follows the tales and adventures of a young man who abandons the crass consumerism of the modern world for travels in the wide expanse of the American wilderness.

But it is so much more.

The movie follows Chris, in a non-linear sequence, as he graduates from university with the prospect of attending Yale Law School. While celebrating the graduation at a local restaurant, his father offers him a new car as a gift, a gift that Chris rejects, and in this we can start to see exposed the issues and forces in his life. Chris doesn?t want or need another ?thing?, his father is offended, his mother tries to mediate, Chris want his parents to understand who he is and where he is coming from, his sister sits and watches and can see it all.

In this we can see the start of a man who decides to leave all of it behind and become a tramp, backpacking and travels across the wilderness: Arizona?s deserts, the Colorado river, Mexico and ending up in Alaska. Along the way he meets and befriends a rang of people all of whom he has an emotional impact on.

This movie is beautifully filmed and hand crafted, every thing is shot location (and in the credits there are dozens of sites) and the harsh beauty of the American outback is superbly portrayed.

This film is much more than just the physical journey, it is also an exploration of a man?s soul and what drives him, the connections between people, the choices they make and how that influences the trajectory of their lives, the relationship between people and their environment, how people are controlled by the things they possess and how they understand themselves and their place in the world.

Chris reads Tolstoy on his travels and there is something of the movie that has the massive sweep and depth of a Russian novel. Margaret and David gave this movie four and a half and five stars and Margaret says it is close to being a masterpiece. Margaret is wrong – it is a masterpiece. It has its flaws, it drags at times, it jumps around a little to much, but is a beautiful story, with magnificent imagery, great stories and characters and so many layers of depth I find it hard to think that a better movie has been made. Ever.

Death at a Funeral is a light-hearted comedy of manners centered around the misshapes and misadventures at a funeral one fine day in merry England. The movie has the array of odd types, the son who is doing the eulogy but is hurt that everyone thinks his brother the writer should be doing it. The brother, a faux rich New York type who is disconnected from his family. The neurotic mother and the friend who is a pharmacy student but also sidelines in psychotropic drugs.

Margaret and David both thought it was gorgeous and I think Margaret gives you some sense of the movie when she says she has not laughed as must since The 40 Year Old Virgin. I can kind of see where they are coming from, it is a finely written and filmed movie, but ultimately never rises above the slapstick. Yes, it is amusing to see a guest accidentally under the influence of a mind altering drug, the conflict between family members and the deep family secret at risk of being revealed. But the film never does anything more than these (fairly obvious) slapstick mechanisms and in the end I found the movie to be a pretty bland experience overall.

I would recommend that instead you go and hire a DVD of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

This is the third in the sequence of the Bourne Identity movies, baed on the original novel by Robert Ludlum. If you have seen the first two movies then you could well imagine the basic premise of this movie: Jason Bourne, the main protagonist, is some kind of secret agent/trained killer, who has no memory of his past and spends the most of the movie trying to uncover his origins while utilising his amazing secret agent skills to ward off the ever increasing resources of the secret CIA people who originated him but now want to kill him. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie, this is not a spoiler, these plot details are pretty much revealed in the first five minutes.

What most of the movie is, is an action packed physical playing out of the above plot. Not much is added during this physical play out, but there are some interesting scenes, the cities look great and Jason Bourne is really tough.

The movie suffers from the inevitable 3rd movie syndrome. This occurs for any of these franchise type movies, everyone who has seen the previous movies knows all the plot details etc, so there is little point spending time on the slow reveling of information. Instead directors tend to rather focus on action, and of course the way to beef it up from the previous movies is more and bigger action. The side effect of this is that the main character seems to gain more fantastic capabilities. Whereas in the first movie, it was mostly a psychological thriller, this film ends up being an action film where you would not at all be surprised if it was revealed that Jason Bourne was in fact, the second coming of Christ and could walk on water (as well as defeating the entire CIA single handedly).

On a purely technical note the movie was filmed entirely in handheld mode, a cinematic style that can sometimes suit certain types of movies. However, “Action-Thriller” is a type of movie that is almost never improved by hand-held and some of the car chases in particular exemplify this, where the constant cutting between wobbly blurred clips reduces the information load to little more that “some care moving and crashing” with no definition.

Of course, all this negativity shouldn’t imply that I thought that the movie was that bad. Matt Damon is actually quite good in the role of emotionless Jason Bourne, the action is quite passable you never get bored (which in my experience is better than most movies). But that is about the extent of it, nothing really grabs you, and honestly, the most interesting thing to discuss afterwards is why it wasn’t a better movie.

I must admit to being mildly surprised to see the accolades given to this movie in some quarters. For example, in a review of the Oscars, the Slate magazine movie critic Dana Stevens says:

“Emmanuel Lubezki will win the cinematography prize for his innovative lensing of Children of Men. Not only because it truly is groundbreaking camerawork…but because that nomination and two others (one for editing, the other for best adapted screenplay) are the only crumbs being thrown to what was, to my mind, the single finest film of the year.”

The best film of the year? In Australia the movie was given 4/5 by both Margaret and David, and if they can agree on something then it must signal that they (collectively) view it as a good movie.

And yet for me the movie was a huge disappointment. I went to see the movie with an open mind, in fact I was quite keen, what with Clive Owen (star of the little gem Croupier). The premise was also quite interesting – (don’t worry no real spoilers) a world where the last child was born 18 years ago and the world faces a slow aging until there is no one left.

For me this was the core of the problem with the movie, while the premise was interesting it was explored very little in the movie. There are some references to it at the beginning of the movie, but it quite rapidly descends into a chase/thriller/action movie, with very little additional examination of society. The action is based around a number of organisations that have sprung up, none of which has much background and it is difficult to get a sense of the motivations of the characters (other than to not get shot in one of the chases). No attempt is made to explain why the world has ended up the way it has or what that means.

Fundamentally the movie is an action adventure, with long drawn out gun battles and chases.

I suspect the attraction of the movie is in some sense more political. The Britain that is presented in one besieged by refugees with cages and camps everywhere. The cause of this is not clearly stated but assumably has something to do with the fact of babies no longer being born. But it adds nothing to the plot or the themes, it is just a device (any movie could assume something bad happens and all the refugees head for Britain).

I suspect this may drive the difference between my perception of the movie and the view of others. For me the core of the the movie was cold and lacked nourishment, they failed to explore the interesting premise and filled the movie with chases and violence and interminable wandering through refugee camps.

For others, who for various reasons may take a much stronger view on refugee issues (whether they be Australians, with our harsh border protection policies, or Americans, with their Guantanamo Bay) the movie is all about refugees, and the interminable gun battles in the refugee camps had some greater message.