M-FOR-MOVIES!!

Easy to pick holes in Huston’s brave stab at Melville’s masterpiece, which opens with breathtaking boldness as a solitary wanderer appears over the brow of a hill, comes to camera to proclaim his ‘Call me…Ishmael’, then leaves it to follow in the wake of his odyssey. Granted the great white whale is significantly less impressive when lifting bodily out of the sea to crush the Pequod than when first glimpsed one moonlit night, a dim white mass of menace lurking in a black sea. Granted, too, a lightweight Ahab(Peck) and a pitifully weak Starbuck(Genn). But there are marvellous things here: Ishmael’s alarming initiation into the whaling community at the tavern; Father Mapple’s sermon (superbly delivered by Welles); Queequeg’s casting of the bones and his preparation for death; nearly all the whaling scenes. Lent a stout overall unity by ray Bradbury’s intelligent adaptation, by color grading which gives the images the tonal quality of old whaling prints, and by the discreet use of a commentary drawn from Melville’s text which imposes the resonance of legend, it is often staggeringly good.

Despite initial surprise that Cronenberg was to film David Henry Hwang’s play about an affair between a French diplomat and a she-male Chinese opera singer, links with the horrormeister’s earlier work soon become clear. It’s disappointing, however, that Cronenberg’s dissection of the extremities of desire and the slippage of sex roles is less radical than in,say,Dead Ringers or The Naked Lunch. In pre-cultural revolution Beijing of the early ‘60’s, Rene Gallimard, inspired by a performance of Madame Butterfly, projects on to singer song Liling(lone) a cultural imperialist fantasy of complaint Chinese womanhood. For reasons that remain obscure, he/she responds by recreating him/herself in this image, acting out a parody of sub missive femininity and initiating a bizarre but mutually fulfilling charade .Blackmailed by a party official into obtaining political secrets, Song Liling later draws her lover into playing his own double role as a spy. Only when their espionage is revealed in a Paris court does Gallimard discover his lover’s best-kept secret.

George Miller’s film is an outrageous exploiter drawing intelligently on everything from death race 2000 to straw dogs for its JG Ballard-ish story about a future where cops and Hell’s Angels stage protracted guerrilla warfare around what’s left of a hapless civilian population. The tone sometimes wavers into self-parody, and three are occasionally crude patches, but overall this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.

The video diary is possibly the easiest form of DIY film-making, but it’s a demanding format to fake-or watch. Asking actors to pretend to be ‘unnatural’ in front of the camera smacks of bad faith.Ascaride, familiar from her films with Robert Guediguian, is sent into paroxysms of giggles as Caroline, whenever teenage son Etienne (Tavares) turns on his new camera ,and it rings very false. In one sense, this is a very naked style: Ma Vraie Vie may be a fake, but edited in camera, in effect, it can’t hide its fakery behind the artifice of conventional cinema, behind mise-en-scene, music or montage. The story sneaks in while you’re drifting. Etienne is 16, an ice skater and a virgin. This will be ‘the year of love’, he tells his best friend. Meanwhile, his voyeuristic hobby is becoming an obsession, much to the irritation of those around him. It’s a film about gazing: about why we film what we film; what we yearn to express but cannot put into words. The longer you give the movie, the better it works-but you do have to meet it more than halfway. At the very least, it’s another adventurous departure for Ducastel and Martineau, whose first film was a musical about AIDS, and whose second was the road movie Drole de Felix.

Baker’s the big lumpy cop who wont take no and another assignment for an answer when he’s told to lay off the gun-happy lawyer (Saxon) he suspects of cold-blooded murder, and to concentrate on the businessman with the coke connection ( Balsam). He realizes that in such a sparsely-populated cheapie they just have to be in collusion, as he punches and shoots his way to the final credits accompanied by vocal encouragement from one of those country singers with terminal cancer. Balsam and Saxon contribute no more than their required quota of urbane sneers before being bulldozed into oblivion by the golden hero of this irredeemably routine potboiler.

Detective Vince Edwards hunts Los Angeles for dynamiter Chuck Connors (a nicely quirky characterization), who is writing to the papers to explain that his bombs are punishments meted out to society. The victims include a high school, a hospital, a Women’s Lib group… and aid comes from the unlikely quarter of a pathetic rapist (Brand, another fine performance). Shoddily assembled, but brightly conceived and very well acted, it has a genuine B movie vitality.

Nolan’s ‘keyhole dick’ is ludicrously quick with his fists and has an annoying habit of twirling a keychain round his finger, he’s also not above faking a murder( with a Mickey finn and a bottle of catsup) to frighten the sense back into the headstrong girl (Weaver) he’s supposed to be chaperoning. Based on a novel by Brett Halliday, Dividend on Death, this is the first in a series of 12 produced by FOX between 1940 and ‘47. It’s an extremely convoluted betting and horse-swapping mystery, with a mildly diverting subplot featuring an elderly Ellery Queen fan (Patterson) who helps Shayne with this not terribly diverting ‘baffle book’ case. Nolan is a reliable player, and Bogart’s Marlowe may have learned something from him, but he lacks ingrained world-weariness.

A comparison between this and Terrance Malick’s Badlands makes for an interesting contrast between American and European concepts of the cinema. Both films deal with a couple in flight, and the way in which a puzzled society becomes engrossed in their one-way journey. But there the similarities end. In Malick’s film, the violence is within the central characters themselves. Tanner uses the progress of his female travellers to examine, not them but the harsh logic that underpins an ‘exemplary’ capitalist state like Switzerland. Thus, once Clementine Amouroux and Catherine Retore choose to become marginal characters - when they meet, they decide for a lark to see how long they can survive without money - they soon find that society has no place within it for them.