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FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead
Marking Australia Week (April 3-6) for the second year
running is OzFlix: Australian Film Weekend at the Pacific Cinematheque,
April 4-6. One of the highlights, Lucky Miles, won the Audience
Award at the Sydney Film Festival. The film, which screens on the
first night of the festival, is a humorous outback survival story
dealing with the hot button issue of asylum seekers. Based on an
apparently true event in 1990, refugees are abandoned on an Australian
desert coastline, at the mercy of the elements and a half-hearted
border patrol.
The OzFlix program also includes the surf movie Bra
Boys, about a working class gang of wave-riders in Maroubra
in Sydney's south. Narrated by Russell Crowe, it was apparently
the "most successful theatrical documentary in Australian history."
Television documentary Crowded House – Woodface, features
the Oz rock band of the title as they strain to put out their Woodface
album. Bit of Black Business, a series of short films created
by indigenous filmmakers, explores contemporary Aboriginal life.
(You can get tickets to the films separately or a weekend pass and
membership for $40.)
There's a short archival clip in Martin Scorsese's
Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light where a fresh-faced
Mick Jagger is asked if he can see himself still performing when
he's of pensionable age. His response: "Absolutely. Easily."
And here he is 63-years-old, his looks weathered by time, but still
throwing his skinny frame about the stage like a man decades younger.
Shine a Light was shot by a crack team of cinematographers
at the Beacon Theatre in New York City in 2006, during the band's
"A Bigger Bang" tour and on the occasion of the 60th birthday
of former US President Bill Clinton. Scorsese, whose other music
filmwork includes editing on Woodstock, directing the Bob
Dylan biopic No Direction Home and a forthcoming documentary
about George Harrsion, takes the concert movie route here. Archival
footage is interspersed with renditions of the Stones' performing
a repertoire of classics. It's more about the live performance,
and Jagger's in particular, than anything else. Shine a Light
opens at the IMAX on April 4.
In The Forgotten Woman, debut director Dilip Mehta picks
up on the theme of sister Deepa's Water, about the plight
of widows in 1938 India. The new documentary looks at the state
of widows in India today and director and cinematographer Dilip
goes into the ashrams and streets, where millions of Indian widows
are still forced by tradition to live their remaining years isolated
from and shunned by society. Deepa is credited as the writer of
the film. The Forgotten Woman should be out now.
Having survived a month-long binge on Big Macs, super-sized greasy
fries and sugary drinks a few years ago, Morgan Spurlock puts himself
back in harm's way in the documentary Where in the World
Is Osama Bin Laden? (April 18). The premise for this escapade
arises when the Super Size Me star decides that, in order
for his new-born child to be safe, he must find the most wanted
man on the planet. Borrowing elements from his smash hit –
even his doctor makes another appearance – Spurlock plays the
naive American abroad getting to know the Arab world a little better.
How funny you find it will probably depend on how much you like
Morgan Spurlock.
At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of its artistic approach
to the US in the Middle East, is Errol Morris's Standard
Operating Procedure, due out May 2. Morris's The Fog
of War (2003), a potent, candid piece of documentary filmmaking,
captured the Cold War mindset through its portrait of former US
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. This time, Morris turns
to the Abu Ghraib prison incident five years ago and those infamous
images of hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners piled on top of each
other. In what Morris has described as his "non-fiction horror
movie," he endeavours to go beyond the media story. Morris
takes the view that the infamous photographs, while exposing the
horrors of the prison were also "a cover-up" because they
didn't get to the root of the crime.
Robert Alstead made the Vancouver-set bicycle documentary You
Never Bike Alone, available on DVD at www.youneverbikealone.com
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