There are a lot of “Alices” out there and a lot of “Wonderlands” too.  My personal favorite has tended to be Jan Svankmejer’s 1988 Alice, which is largely stop-motion animated and not exactly true to the source material, so I’m not a purist when it comes to adaptations.  But it should be noted that this is not your classic Alice in Wonderland.  Far from it.  Alice winds up in a suit of armor slaying a dragon.

You know, if you take the story and go off the road with it, that’s one thing, but when you take a story that is off the roadway to begin with and pick it up and put it onto a much more commonly trodden path, you end up with a real irony.  It’s ironic that a work that appeals to Surrealist sensibilities, fantasy, and subversion is adapted by a director known for visual style and a gleamingly dark eye and it ends up being far more conventional in the end.

I mean, it looks fantastic.  But the story is a weakness, unimaginative, derivative, and not really too clever.

Tim Burton is a director that I’ve long had a like/dislike relationship with (not strong enough for love/hate).  He’s got a fantastic eye for design, whether it’s his own or it’s the other collaborators with whom he works.  He’s attracted, largely, to pretty interesting material, but really most frequently comes across as a great visual stylist, with occasional flairs for highly appealing stuff, but one whose weakness is in the level of story and ultimately originality, as he is also most often “re-booting” old ideas or adapting pre-existing popular stories or characters.

That said, I had quite enjoyed his last two films more than I had anticipated, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), so I’d had a growing hope that this film might wind up on the more positive side of the fence, too.  I’d been quite attracted by the trailers and the designs and aesthetics of the world of Wonderland.

Did I mention that it’s also in Disney Digital 3-D?

In the opening and closing parts of the story, which place Alice in her Victorian world, initially the child of the classic version, but now a 20 year old, an independent girl, who doesn’t want to wear a corset or marry a dullard Lord.  She’s a proto-feminist, you see.   The film doesn’t really matter a whole lot in those segments.  It’s really tiresome.

It only gets fun the moment she falls down the rabbit hole and the vision becomes that of a hyper-hallucination, depicted through the latest in digital animation/effects.  And it’s something.  The talking flowers, the Cheshire cat, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the queen of hearts (Helena Bonham Carter with an enlarged cranium), each figure as it emerges is highly pleasurable and vivid.  There is a point as this segment begins, that you almost think to yourself, “Wow, this could be awesome!”  And that feeling carries on for a while. 

Up through her meeting with the Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp in a bright red wig, whitened face, and glowing googly eyes, varying between yellow and green, depending on his mood.  His face alone is almost worth the price of admission.  But his performance is not.  Depp may well be one the most appealing leading men in Hollywood, with a litany of entertaining if not very entertaining films to his name, but how many “characters” can you come up with that are just “so unusual”.  And beyond that, his character, the Mad Hatter, is not as mad as he could be.  He’s quite likeable, fun while he’s there, but like the rest of the film, largely a visual pleasure.

Ultimately there is this, well, feminist would be too strong of a word, but this aim at female empowerment.  Give Alice the sword, the role so often handed to the young boy who needs to become a man.  Clad her in shining armor and have her slice the dragon’s head off.  It’s not hard to get the point, nor is the point deep enough to really cut.  The whole film is just a beautifully rendered, visually enthralling, yet flaccid effort, not unworthy of seeing, but a squandered opportunity at least.

There are a lot of Alice’s out there, and doubtlessly, this will not the the end of the list.  I loved the character designs.  But give me the far more bizarre and creepy Svankmejer Alice.  Maybe it’s not half so colorful, but it’s a lot more complex.

I’d long planned to see The Golden Compass but I think that at the time it came out, I guess I figured it would be a bit much for the kids (they would have been 3 and 5, respectively).  And then it stayed in my queue for a while.  I bought the book, since I heard it was good, but we never got around to reading it.  And then, just recently, they picked up the audiobook of the novel (they listen to a lot of them as they get trotted around the city) and then they got around to seeing the film without me.

Well, no time like the present.

Unfamiliar with the books (outside of general knowledge of them), the story was fresh to me, but I could tell that it was compromised significantly by being compressed into a film of reasonable length (nearly 2 hours).  There was a lot going on, a lot of characters, a lot of narrative and ideas, so much so, the film sort of leaps along like a too-fast ride at an amusement park.  A sort of scary and thought-provoking ride, but nonetheless.

The story is far too complicated to explain here, but it takes place in an alternate universe where people’s souls are embodied in animal form, always with them like best friends, and are referred to as “demons”.  For some reason, this organization, called the Magisterium (and which in the books is more clearly meant to be the Catholic church in this alt-reality), wants to sever children from their demons/souls.  And they hate science and alternate explanations to the world from what their teachings say.

I’m guessing that the book is a far-better way to go with this one, because there are lots of ideas at work and there is hardly any time to think them through.  And in the end, there is a battle akin to something from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) or some J.R.R. Tolkien thingamabob, with witches and polar bears and pirates fighting guys who look like the Russian version of the S.S.  It’s a bit of a cultural, historical mash-up of period and setting, so much so, at least in an alternate reality you don’t have to try to figure it all out.

The movie’s star is Dakota Blue Richards, who is quite good and really a remarkably striking young girl.  Nicole Kidman is the ice queen villainess, and she’s icy alright.  Daniel Craig is Lord Asriel, the good guy, but neither of them appear a whole lot throughout the film.  The film is directed by Chris Weitz and even adapted by him.  Weitz was one of the brothers behind American Pie (1999) and then went on to direct About a Boy (2002) and I have to say from those two films really hasn’t cemented himself as a director of quality.  I’ve read that the studio took the film and re-edited it, so perhaps it’s not all his fault, but the movie, while not bad, squanders much richer material than Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) or potentially even the Harry Potter franchise.  Who knows?

Well, a sequel has not been forthcoming, so maybe we’ll never know from a film perspective.  However, I did buy the book that is the sequel The Subtle Knife, and we’ll see how that goes.

The latest teen novel franchise to become a movie franchise (as of this last week), bears the unwieldy over-branded title of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.  Adapted from the first book in a series of Percy Jackson stories from Rick Riordan and directed by Harry Potter directorial alum Chris Columbus, what looked to me to be a highly derivative and onerous concept turns out to be a pretty decent film, and probably series of films.

This wasn’t high on my list of coming children-targetted films, but the day looked gloomy and I’d read that kids of my son’s age (he’s 8) were eating it up.  And finally, it was rated PG, not PG-13 (though it’s pretty intense, featuring some very scary monsters for those with young ones), which meant that taking my daughter would not be a no-no (she turns 6 in two days).  Actually, Felix reported that everyone at his school said that it was really cool.

This film takes the Harry Potter concept, a child born who has magical powers but who is stuck in a less-than-ideal world with some absent parentage (his mom is there), and reveals to him his legacy and a “school” (or in this case a training camp) where others like him are legion.  In this case, he’s not a wizard, but the son of the Greek god Poseidon.  Turns out that the Greek gods never really went away, in fact, you can get to Mt. Olympus by going to the top of the Empire State Building (who knew?!)  What this means for theology is one thing, but what it means, apparently, for lots of present day kids is the “cool” concept of the Greek gods existing in the modern world.

My son is pretty interested in Greek mythology.  He has picture books about the subject and we’ve read a book that covered the general breadth and major stories as well.  Aparently this is not an uncommon interest.

What is kind of weird is that this film trumps the coming re-make of Clash of the Titans (1981), featuring stuff like Medusa (in this case played by Uma Thurman) and the giant gods on Mt. Olympus and their armor-clad heroes on Earth.  The new Clash of the Titans will be in 3-D and I’m guessing that this movie may actually help that one to better box office.

The film moves rapidly along, with a number of monsters, scary monsters, attacking Percy.  See, Percy is a demi-god (like Hercules and Theseus — and all of the other people at camp), but being the son of one of the powerful three, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, he’s more powerful and unusual.  He has to fight a fury, a minotaur, Medusa, a Hydra, and enter the lair of the Lotus Eaters (among other adventures) in order to save his mother from the grasp of Hades, who has taken her to the underworld. 

You see, someone has stolen Zeus’ lightning bolt, and everyone thinks it’s Percy.  And the gods are all going to go to war if it’s not found.  Percy wants to prove his innocence and stop the war, but anyways, it all ties together.

The Lotus Eaters sequence is an odd one.  This is where the 3rd pearl (one of their quest items) is located, and it is located in a Las Vegas casino.  Percy and his pals eat these lotus cookies and start basically tripping and laughing and having a grand old time and never want to leave, forgetting what they were there for and just keep eating lotus cookies and staying high.  Set in a casino, it’s kind of funny, since casinos are built to create a similar environment, a time and temperature that never changes, a sense of enjoyment, and that you never want to leave.  The other ramifications, for opiates, et cetera, well, I’ll leave that for you to read into it.

Really, the film is enjoyable.  The kids both liked it, Felix especially, and it really doesn’t waste time trying to be overly original nor worrying about any other issues of meaning or subtext (though Catherine Keener, the ubiquitous single mom is the single mom here – subtext that).  It’s better than I thought it would be, though the title really doesn’t get any better.  It’s too damn long.

I’d been on a little horror jag for the day, not planned, though I’d queued all the films up and they were all sitting here, waiting to be watched.  No planning.  No plan.  The only theme being that they were recent horror films.  I’d watched the moderately entertaining Norwegian nazi zombie film Dead Snow (2009) and followed it up with the ridiculously disgusting and comic Ti West film Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009) and I had Deadgirl on tap, actually having gotten interested in it having seen a trailer for it on the DVD of The House of the Devil (2009), Ti West’s other film from 2009.

The parallels built themselves, oddly enough.  This film, as in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever featured both actor Noah Segan, hero of the former, villain of the present.  And also, the actor Michael Bowen showed up again, this time as a drunken mom’s boyfriend rather than gay high school principal, but you know…how often are you going to watch two films back-to-back with those two actors in it?  That’s like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing or something.

Deadgirl is a strange premise.  Actually, I would say that the premise is perhaps the most strange because of the accepted behavior of the two lead teenage boys, Segan and his buddy, our hero, Shiloh Fernandez.  So, two teens go drinking beer and raising hell in an abandoned mental hospital (we’ve all done that, right?)  And their explorations uncover (literally) a naked woman, strapped down to a table deep in a basement. 

Rather than immediately seeking the help of police or trying to rescue her, Segan suggests that they “keep” her.  While Fernandez is scandalized by this, he doesn’t turn his buddy in, but goes home to brood over this and the all-American girl he yearns for who hardly knows he’s alive.  But Segan seeks him out and tells him that he’s made a discovery.  The girl is dead.  But can’t be killed.  He’s tried.  She can’t be killed.

Turns out that Segan has been fucking around with the deadgirl and discovered, after choking her to death and breaking her neck 3 times that she, much like the Energizer bunny, just keeps on going.  And he proves this to Fernandez by plugging her with a couple of bullets.  So, this is when he gets the idea that this deadgirl isn’t really human and should be kept for a sex slave.  A continually rotting, more and more disgusting, sex slave.

Okay, this is the thing.  The concept is putrid.  And perhaps even more putrid than the concept is the fact that the writers and directors of this film seem to think that while our hero “has issues” with this, he not only does nothing, but there are several other fellows who think that raping a living corpse is just peachy.  Is this really concieveable?  I mean, I know we’re dealing with a living corpse but the regular people, are they believeable?  Would no one run to the authorities, wonder who she was/is, try to find her the help she needs?  Not empathize with the amoral horny teenagers?  And would teenagers so gladly embrace necrophilia?

That’s what we’ve got here.  Necrophilia and teenagers.  Torn from the headlines.

The bottom line is that the plausibility of this world is just too much to make.  And the fact that the authors consider the morality of the human teenager to be so suspect as to believe that they’ll fuck anything (including her pus-oozing bullet wounds — No Shit!) is just beyond my ability to believe.  I mean to believe that one, really fucked up and alienated teenager might go to such extremes or that even say two might…well fucked up shit does happen, but when even your moral pillar, your hero, as much as he turns his prudish nose up at it ultimately (in the happy? ending) seems to take to his own deadgirl, you just have to say “what the fucking fuck?”

What I liked about the film was its far extremity of bad taste and subject matter, and even its twisted scenario in which something so crazy is the setting for the story.  But it’s too much to take that everyone is so fucking disgusting and amoral that raping a living corpse is a good time (to be had by all comers).  It’s sick.  Not sick like the gross-out Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever special effects and pus and ooze (though it has its small share) but sick in the way that it just assumes that it makes sense that no one went to the police to report such fucking strange and bizarre phenomena as a living dead woman.

This film, while reasonably interesting, I’ve found to be quite morally repugnant.  And maybe coming from someone who can enjoy such a gross-out flick as Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, maybe that means nothing.  But on the other hand, who is this film for?  Is it for those lonely teens who wish, wish, wish that they had their own living dead girl to enact sexual deviance upon?  To gang rape a corpse?

Excuse me.  Puke.

As you can probably guess from the title of this film, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, an unfortunate title any way you slice it, this film is the sequel to the film Cabin Fever (2002), the film that put Eli Roth onto the the film world.  Though Roth also directed Hostel (2005), he’s perhaps better recognized these days as the “Bear Jew” from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), in which he shares the screen with Brad Pitt, announcing the “might just be my masterpiece” line (am I the only one who snags on that?)

However, Cabin Fever 2 is directed by another horror phenom, Ti West, director of The House of the Devil (2009).

I don’t know, I’ve had a penchant for horror films of late and today turned into a mini festival of sorts, starting with Dead Snow (2009), followed by this one and followed again by another.  It’s the kind of indulgence that I allow myself every once in a while.  But the strange thing, is this one turned out quite fruitful.

Cabin Fever 2 is a surprisingly decent, if not actually pretty darn good, horror comedy.  The casting is good, featuring several young actors who have good character in their roles.  The film is funny.  Actually quite amusing, riffing on the ultimate gross-out of disgustingness.  And yes, it’s a gore-fest of note.  I mean, I don’t watch gore movies for gore, generally speaking, but you have to appreciate the over-the-topness of the buckets of blood, intestines, oozing pustules, ugh.  Much very cringe-worthy material.  Not for the faint of stomach.

The story opens initially with a quick wrap-up of the original, which splats a body with a school bus, and suddenly you get the title sequence.  It’s meant to be punchy and funny, and it is.  The title sequence is a cartoon that shows how the deadly flesh-eating ebola-like virus of the first film gets into bottled water and gets distributed to a high school just in time for prom.  Basically, we’ve got a whole school of teenagers about to rot and bleed and fall to pieces.

The story (there actually is one) that follows the loner guy who desires the pretty girl (who is a friend) (who has a violent jock boyfriend) and how he strives to get the girl.  Sure, it’s a story as old as the hills, but it’s set to this shocking and gory background.  And yet, it kind of works.

The movie works not just on shock value, but actually works because it’s got good enough characters, a tasteless and overt humor, and the goriest gore that I’ve seen in a long, long time.  Again, it’s not my usual thing, but the film takes the gore to a high, high level and it’s not all digital crap but some very painful to watch, nauseating, disgusting sequences.

In short, it’s a minor masterpiece.  I know I’m overstating it to say that, but what the hell.  I liked it.

And oddly enough, it featured Michael Bowen, who I mainly am aware of because of my liking for the film Valley Girl (1983), in which he played the bully bad boy.  This film seems to tip its hat a bit to Valley Girl, having Bowen, now in his 40’s, as the gay principal of the school, but appearing at a gaudy prom, and featuring the song “Monster of Love” by Sparks, which is a key song from Valley Girl.  Now, I know that may sound like some seriously nerdy aspect of the film, but heck, it was there.  I noted it.  So there.

When you’ve seen one Norwegian Nazi zombie movie, you’ve seen ‘em all.

That said, it’s not all that often these come along.

Dead Snow, I think I just summarized it reasonably well for you, is your typical horror genre film, a bunch of young people in an isolated cabin (in this case in the Norwegian mountains, which are quite beautiful), and the stirring of stolen Nazi gold, hidden away for decades, brings to life an army of zombie German soldiers leftover from WWII.  You know how that can happen.

The film is a pretty by-the-book affair despite the premise, but with a lot of fairly gory blood-letting and a few gruesome surprises.  Director Tommy Wirkola seems to have a particular penchant for intestines.  In fact, the film’s most novel point has one of the vacationing medical students hanging by some stretched-out intestine of a defeated Nazi zombie, dangling over a cliff while he battles another of the creatures.

Beyond that, there is something aesthetic about the Nazi zombies in their military regalia, stark against the snow.  Maybe aesthetic in some video game sort of way, something gruesome and absurd, yet titilating.

While there is obviously some subtext here, these hidden, lost Nazis, both historical and literal among the outlying reaches of clean and modern Scandanavia could carry some weight.  But in the end, that’s about all the subtext there is.  Only one of the campers has a 1/4 of Jewish blood somewhere and the film isn’t too bothered with Nazi evils other than greed pretty much.  Certainly, there’s that.  But in the end, they’re just nattily-clad zombies, who work together as a military group might, with the aim of dismembering the young and old alike.  Like I said, you know how that can happen.

The Last Station is a film about the turbulent last year in the life of a great writer and the love of his life.  In this case, the great writer is Leo Tolstoy in his 80’s and the love of his life is his wife of more than 40 years.  I had thought it interesting that I’d also relatively recently seen another film about the last year in the life of a great writer, the poet John Keats, and the love of his life.  Bright Star (2009) is Keats and love and tragedy and youth, while The Last Station is Tolstoy and love and tragedy but at the end of a long and full life.

Perhaps the comparison really ends there.  Perhaps not.

The Last Station is what I refer to as an “actorly” film (I don’t think I coined that phrase but spell checks, when I think to use them, like to correct that word), and as an “actorly” film, not the kind of film to which I am normally drawn.  The reason being is that what I mean by “actorly” films is that these are films in which big actors are given juicy roles to play, and the draw to the films is to see the actors, engaged in acting, gunning often for awards.  And, of course, this is certainly something that appeals to a lot of people.  I prefer films that are made by directors, made with somewhat more of a sense of authorship and meaning, character, and vision.  And I find that most of these films that are primarily stages to be trod by actors, they have less in the sense of vision and meaning, even if they are well-made.

For me, The Last Station is a good version of an actorly film, though not one that is overtly driven by the director’s sense of film.  But it’s also driven by its story, the reality of the final year in the life of one of the great writers of the world, and for me, someone that I was particularly interested in biographically.  I just finished reading “War and Peace” after the new year and had read an interesting article on Tolstoy a few years before, so was more open to seeing this film than perhaps I might be many others that I (perhaps very subjectively and not necessarily correctly) have deemed to be “actorly” films.

The acting is good, of course.  Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, Paul Giamatti, and James McAvoy to name the bigger of the names.  Mirren and Plummer get the most plum work, and McAvoy’s character, a Tolstoy devotee who lands the job as a secretary to the great writer, while not the most interesting of roles, is actually quite good.  Mirren’s character, the Countess Tolstoy, gets the most overt drama, big histrionics, and comic turns, depicting a woman given to drama.  She’s pretty much the center of the film.  Plummer is well-embedded in his character, oozing the joy of life of a man of greatness, yet also the frustration with the dramas going on around him.

Tolstoy, in late life, became very politicized and inspired by religion, and looked upon his wealth and status as a very negative thing.  His desire to commit to a more spiritually-driven and focussed life made the Countess feel deeply rejected and threatened, especially by the people who surrounded Tolstoy, seemingly looking to profit from his good nature and generosity.  Ultimately, Tolstoy is driven away from his wealth and his family in escape from the drama, but the Countess as well.  And the key of the story is that they have a great and true love that has existed and endured many decades, much devotion, much collaboration, and is hanging by a thread.  Love can endure, but it can still be a pain in the ass.

Perhaps this focus on love, in the last year of a great writer’s life, at two polar ends of the spectrum of the length of life, is what drew me to the comparison between the Keats film and this one.  Tolstoy died at 82, Keats at age 25.  But perhaps more than I could draw from these biographical examinations (both films are adaptations of biographical books), is also the artistry of filmmaking.  Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star, is much more a work of an auteur, a film that is more than the material and actors and story, is part of the filmmaker’s breadth of work and a much more moving and vivid film.  The Last Station, while well-acted, well-produced, and quite a decent film, is much more pedestrian of an experience by comparison.  To me, anyway.

That is opinion but also perhaps observation.  Not meant to denigrate the Tolstoy film, but to make a point, perhaps about the types of films that I choose to watch.

I’ve liked Drew Barrymore since I first saw her as Gertie in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) when she was all of about 6 years old.  I was charmed like many people by her and saw her in Firestarter (1984) and Cat’s Eye (1985).  And while I didn’t follow her career exactly as she went through her drug and rehab stints as a young girl and had come out the other end by 1990, writing her “biography” at age 15 in “Little Girl Lost”.

I did, however, take a liking to her re-rise to fame in trashy films like Poison Ivy (1992), Guncrazy (1992), and Doppelganger (1993), and her big turning point, The Amy Fisher Story (1993) when she was suddenly “back”.  As she built up her modern image in light fare aimed at young girls: Ever After (1998) and Never Been Kissed (1999), I still liked her even if I wasn’t interested in her movies.  And I thought she’d done well for herself, developing a production company and making it big with Charlie’s Angels (2000) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). 

But to see her take up directing?  Wasn’t really necessary.

Whip It is a movie about girls’ roller derby, a retro sport that has gained popularity over the past several years, and stars the chipper Ellen Page of Juno (2007) fame.  It’s the sort of lightweight teen outsider comedy mixed with the sports film, set to a fair amount of 1980’s tunes and populated with a number of recognizable faces.  The film is about exactly what you would imagine it to be, light as a feather, shallow as a puddle, and relatively entertaining nonetheless.

Barrymore appears in it as a character that could well-be considered her self-image persona, the pretty, goofy, rowdy girl who fits right in with the brawling babes.  Also on their team, the Hurl Scouts, are Kristen Wiig, Eve, and Zoe Bell (who was last seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007)).  On the opposing side is Juliette Lewis (who also could be argued to playing a close version of her rock’n'roll self) and mom is Marcia Gay Harden and dad is the very likeable Daniel Stern.

When the fim came out last summer, some of the criticism ran agains it and Jennifer’s Body (2009) that the films’ supposed adoption of “grrrl power” motifs were limp-wristed and going-through-the-motions.  I haven’t been able to take that particular slant, but I would say that this film depicts the tough-guy gals as comical but clean.   It’s just good-ol’ fun, and while Page’s mother wants her to be dressed like a proper lady, the call to the identity of the American girl individual is there.  But the world, with its under-age drinking, isn’t drawn up to be dark or scary.  The worst thing that can happen is the boy you like gives your favorite t-shirt to some other girl.  But that’s men for you.

Actually, the worst thing about this film is Jimmy Fallon who plays the announcer/party-thrower.  He’s Jimmy Fallon.  Need I say more? He’s frickin’ annoying (I’ll keep this clean since Drew kept her film clean).

Drew, I still like you but you really don’t need to make any more movies if this is what you’re going to make.  Then again, it might as well be you because they’ll keep getting made by somebody, I suppose.  And God knows, it could have been more annoying.

A movie about a couple of guys who go camping, find a hidden hot springs, take a bath and chat.  What’s not to like, right?   Honestly, I’ve never been one for camping.  And watching two guys go camping in a movie lacks the inconvenience of really doing it yourself, but not the dull boredom.

Oddly enough, I kept thinking of the film Wendy and Lucy (2008), which I’d seen last year, about a girl stuck in the Pacific Northwest, on the down-and-out, amid the humdrum small town in which she finds herself stranded.  Oddly enough, I say, because that film also was by writer/director Kelly Reichardt, adapted as well from a story by Jonathan Raymond.  And it’s both milieu and style that ties these things together, a minimalist naturalism, aimed at the dull, non-overwhelming actuality of life and its less exciting rhythms.

Old Joystars the musician Will Oldham as one of the two friends who go camping.  He’s the wandering one who smokes dope and knows where the hidden hot springs are.  His friend is a father-to-be whose life perhaps at one time mirrored that of Oldham’s character, but is now settling into “something that he can’t easily extract himself from,” which Oldham’s character considers one of the keys to his life.

Nothing in particular happens, so the film is really one of tonality, of suggestion (since much more perhaps goes unsaid than said) and their friendship and yet alienation from one another is sort of the point of the exercise.  But it’s a hard sell.  To be honest, a film in which the most dramatic point is where one guy gives another guy a shoulder massage, you’ve got to be committed to the experiment and the style to follow.

As in Wendy and Lucy, there is a real earnest approach to narrative here, to representing stories of the Northwest, of people that we might easily recognize from the coffee shop or the park bench.  And while I think that this film worked a little more than Wendy and Lucy, it still feels like something is missing (and I don’t mean a car chase or an explosion or two), but I think to pull off this type of subtlety and tonality, in many ways you have to be more a master craftsperson than one who does make digital blue people and things pop off the screen with computers.  It’s hard.  And while I give merit to it, I also wish that it succeed more than it seemed to.

Since watching An Angel at My Table (1990) and Bright Star (2009) last year, I’ve been on a determined path to catch up by watching all of director Jane Campion’s films.  No real order to this, so I’ve selected a sort of odd film of hers here, 1999’s Holy Smoke which is perhaps most pointedly, compared to her other films, a comedy.  All of her films seem to have comic elements at times, but in this case, the whole cast is a bit of an over-the-top decpiction of the Australian family.

While Campion herself is from New Zealand, this film is about a suburban Sydney family who fears that their wayward daughter (played by always charming Kate Winslet) has fallen under the spell of an Indian mystic and has turned into a cultist.  They hire a hot-shot American deprogrammer (played by Harvey Keitel) to come out and break her.  The whole thing turns hurdy-gurdy and eventually climbs to pretty significant absurdist heights.

I’ve noted before, which may or may not be true but there seems in Australian cinema, a picture of Aussies as pretty freaking loopy.  The semi-nuclear family here features some broads caricatures of the gay brother and his boyfriend, the straight brother and his flowzy tart of a wife, the over-bearing but well-meaning mom, and a whole cast of other characters who I never fully got a grasp on their relationships.  To a big extent, this is one of the film’s main characteristics.

But the film is about the highly-confident deprogrammer who goes on his own Australian adventure, drawn in by the rebelious, sexy Winslet, who is both broken according to plan but also manages to “break” her deprogrammer too.

I’d say this film is by no means as strong as Campion’s other films, though it has its charms.  Winslet and Keitel are both compelling.  Winslet’s slutty sister-in-law, played by the tarty Sophie Lee is also quite funny.

But after having become a bit of an “Intervention” junky (the A&E television series that depicts real interventions, though not deprogrammings), some of the methodology and approach seemed kind of strange and suspect.  I guess it’s not really meant to be taken seriously, though it does raise some interesting points, such as whose reality is genuine?  I mean, her family lovingly commits to trying to bring her back, but they are a kook-fest of their own and Keitel’s version of reality becomes so compromised that it’s hard to know just what the grounding is for the ultimate return to “sanity”.  Though the film does find its way there eventually.

I’d say this is definitely a lesser Campion film, but one that might be interesting in an Australian cinema analysis.