The strangest version of all parallel universe proposals is one that emerged gradually over 30 years of theoretical studies on the quantum properties of black holes. The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.

Just wow. From here.

We should probably be talking about Meek’s Cutoff, because that’s the latest film Kelly Reichardt has made and that’s the one getting all the raves, but it’s still hard to get over 2008’s Wendy and Lucy.

Born in and weaned on the slowly creeping dread of the global financial crisis, it has a stark, maudlin beauty, and a frankly astonishing performance from Michelle Williams in the lead role.

If Williams and Reichardt go on to be one of those actor-director couplings that crop up every now and again, we’ll all be much richer for it. There are moments in Wendy and Lucy when the shot is all dressed up and there are actors and acting going on, but Reichardt’s lens lingers on Williams’s Wendy – and it’s remarkable how you get so clear a sense of what is unfolding just by watching her face.

These films are heading to Melbourne as part of a Reichardt retrospective at ACMI, which will include Rivers of Grass, her rarely seen 1993 debut. She has made a name for herself operating with very small budgets, and has spoken about wanting to continue at that level.

When asked by a journalist if this was just a line filmmakers use and then abandon once they meet a certain level of success, Reichardt’s response was magnificent.

“Well, what’s your definition of success?” she asked. “I find that a f***ing annoying question, I have to say.”

While it would be fun to keep poking a bear with a stick, it is the very affable Jon Raymond who is handling press duties for Australia.

Raymond has a long history of collaboration with Reichardt – two of her films, Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy, are based on short stories of his, and Meek’s Cutoff was written specifically for her direction. The first question comes easily – what’s it like working with Reichardt?

“It’s actually incredibly fun,” Raymond says, chuckling. “Contrary to the vibes of the movies themselves, Kelly is one of the funniest people I know, and there’s a lot of jerking around, if you can believe it.

“Wendy and Lucy was shot a couple of blocks from my house. I went down to that set for a couple of days, but Kelly doesn’t like people looking over her shoulder. She’s a private person, and she likes to keep things as small as possible.”

Reichardt and Raymond met via independent filmmaker Todd Haynes, a fellow Oregon native. Reichardt spends so much time in that state that Raymond calls her an honorary citizen, and the three films Raymond has been involved in have been called an Oregon trilogy, an accurate if somewhat lazy appellation.

“We hope to find things that other people can relate to in our backyard. That’s the great hope. I hope that the location is in some ways just a costume for stories that really could happen almost anywhere,” Raymond says.

He has also said in the past that he feels a short story is the correct template for a film. You can understand why: instead of a screenwriter or filmmaker having to choose which bits to condense or leave out of longer source material, they have the much happier task of deciding what they want to emphasise. Or they can let the narrative remain sparse and allow the viewer to fill in the details themselves, as used to great effect with Wendy and Lucy.

Meek’s Cutoff, however, is a more desiccated and dedicated beast, one with a hint of political allegory in its heritage.

“To do something as a straight screenplay is a strange experience. Meek’s is a bigger story than I felt like I could have written as a piece of fiction – it would’ve had to have been a novel or something,” Raymond says.

“It’s not an accident that a story about a group of pioneers being led by a potentially idiotic leader seemed relevant to me at the time. But the hope is that it is more broadly applicable – the issue of how a group makes up its mind and how it is led astray is a perennial problem, and you can overlay a lot of different political eras on top of it.”

The blustery leader in question is Stephen Meek, played by an unrecognisable Bruce Greenwood. And while it’s tempting to say the meek rise up against Meek, it’s not like the women in this film are docile.

That isn’t really much of a spoiler, given that the poster shows a clearly unimpressed Michelle Williams brandishing a rifle. The role, in fact, was written specifically for her; Raymond says he is “quite amazed by what Michelle is able to do”.

“There was always this idea that it was going to be told through the women’s perspective,” he says.

“I hope that it’s not too heroic a description of that uprising. I think the kind of revolt that happens is based on pragmatic issues rather than big, romantic ones. There’s no question that it has that feminist DNA in there, but it’s mutated in some way.”

A lot of the Meek’s-related reportage has it pegged as a genre-defying Western, but what Raymond describes as pragmatism probably makes it truer to the genre. The film is gorgeous to look at – prints wouldn’t look out place on a wall, and the women’s bonnets are like oases of colour in that arid landscape – but it was hard work on the Oregon trail, difficult, bloody and often bloody scary.

An exceedingly impersonal recorded voice yells down the line that there’s just a few minutes left, so there’s only time for a couple more questions. The first of these is whether Raymond sees decisions made on screen that he wishes he had made on print.

“These collaborations with Kelly have been so organic that I haven’t felt a sense of violation. If anything, she’s improved on them – strangely, it hasn’t been that strange,” he says.

We then end up discussing how the Lucy of Wendy and Lucy was actually Kelly’s dog.

“Lucy is in Old Joy also – in fact, part of the whole genesis of Old Joy was that Kelly was looking for a story to adapt in which her dog plays some sort of role, because her dog can’t really be left alone in her apartment. Lucy would just destroy it.

“And that was one of the times; like, fuck, I wish I’d given them a dog in the actual story, because in the film the dog really plays a wonderful role. I think Lucy did so well that going into the next film we wanted to bump her up to a starring role.”

Raymond and Reichardt are working on a screenplay that will also be set in Oregon, with Raymond sounding almost rueful upon being reminded that the Oregon trilogy will soon be no more.

He’s been cheerful throughout the interview, quite the contrast from the maudlin notes his writing and screenwriting often hit. When asked about this, his first reaction is to laugh.

“I don’t know where the bummer vibes come from. Short stories, in some ways, are really designed for that sort of emotional tone. I don’t know why; I think the novels I write are certainly not as morose. But I know what you mean – these are particularly tough stories, and it’s not like that’s how I feel all the time.”

Originally here.

I haven’t seen the Swedish film.

But by the beard of Odin, this is how you cut a trailer.

It’s supposedly leaked from a European site, and it looks like a cam job, but then why does it have the MPAA red band at the start? I smell a canny marketing campaign.

Also that song is Karen O and Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, which is almost as cool as autumn in Melbourne.

So ACMI is doing this Kelly Reichardt retrospective, and they’ve trotted out screenwriter and frequent collaborator Jon Raymond to hit the press trail. This may be because Reichardt is a magnificent, and magnificently difficult, interviewee. Here are some highlights.

Slant: You’ve talked before about wanting to continue working at these sensationally low-budget levels. Isn’t that something filmmakers tend to say and then disregard once they meet with a certain level of success?

KR: Well, what’s your definition of success? I find that to be a fucking annoying question, I have to say.

From here.

Apparently Reichardt doesn’t like people reading too much into her stories, either.

Where do you and Lucy stay when you are scouting for locations?
We stay in a lot of cruddy motels, the kind where you drive right up to the door. I may be getting too old for it, I realize.

Why not stay in B&B’s?
I can’t stand bed and breakfasts. I don’t want to have to have breakfast with people. I just stayed in a B&B in North Carolina, and I felt like I offended the owners because I went out and got my own coffee in the morning.

Well, that is a violation of B&B etiquette.
I didn’t know. I saw this diner I wanted to try. They said to the other people at the table: “Say goodbye to Kelly. She won’t be joining us. She’s going to the diner. She’s from New York!”

That’s a funny story, but doesn’t it suggest you tend to perpetuate the human separateness you bemoan in your new film?
I enjoy people most when I’m away from them.

Just killer. From here.

And here’s the ACMI listing of her films. Wendy and Lucy is brilliant, but be sure to check out Old Joy and Meek’s Cutoff too.

The LA Times had this great article in 2007 about how movie budgets get as inflated as they do. This one is about the Matthew McConaughey vehicle Sahara.

ON an old studio lot outside London, a production crew began work on the movie “Sahara” in November 2003 by staging the crash of a vintage airplane. But when the film opened in theaters in April 2005, the sequence had been deleted. “In the context of the movie, it didn’t work,” said director Breck Eisner. The cost of the 46-second clip: more than $2 million.

And:

“Sahara,” an action-adventure based on the bestselling novel by Clive Cussler, has lost about $105 million to date, according to a finance executive assigned to the movie. But records show the film losing $78.3 million based on Hollywood accounting methods that count projected revenue ($202.9 million in this case) over a 10-year period.

More!

Was it really so hard to sell a gay love story? Yes, that’s a bit of a minor spoiler, but the film’s poster and any subsequent review gives it away too. Plus, there are much bigger deceptions on offer, and if anyone spoils them then feel free to give them a case of the Schembris. For now, I Love You Phillip Morris is playing at the Nova in Carlton, in one of the nice new cinemas with the big armchairs and the fancy digital screens, and you should go and watch it. Please.

It has a lead character whom you would hate were he not so lovable, or, more accurately, were he not in love, and Jim Carrey plays the perfect anti-hero. Ewan McGregor has taken blandness to new depths, but here he channels it into something sweet and dopey, the kind of person you want to tell, again and again, that everything will be all right, and then go out and make it happen. Which is what Carrey’s character does, in increasingly inventive ways. The film is smart, with the kind of jokes that make you laugh, once, as you get a swift shot of a punchline, and then again as you process the implications. It tells its story with some economy, and manages a confronting sort of subtlety in its portrayal of the central relationship between Carrey and McGregor. And the best part? It’s all true. Here’s some further reading, but go and see the film first, because this really will spoil it for you.

This is Minnie, sound asleep.

First of all, honey badger don’t give a shit. Possibly funnier without sound.

It’s A Bird No Really It’s A Bird Dept.

Indian Superman demonstrates the clash of cultures.

Drive With Both Hands On The Wheel Dept.

A guy in Brazil drives his car smack through a rather large amount of cyclists. Lots of injuries but miraculously no deaths. Also, I do not know the collective noun for cyclists.

Just Plain Why Dept.

And finally, Ubisoft’s new sex video game has received a rating that will allow kids to play it. Fun for the family, less fun for Australia’s ridiculous video game censorship laws.

It’s a family problem. How do you tell a story about Martha Wainwright without mentioning her kin? It’s not that it can’t be done, but that the cost of omission is much colour and texture.

Calling from New York, Martha sounds chirpy but a little weary, the vocal equivalent of a smile that turns up the sparkle in her eyes without quite turning up the corners of her mouth. She salts her speech with the phrase “you know”, which is quite appropriate because, for the most part, we do.

Martha, 34, is the child of musician and sometime actor Loudon Wainwright III and the folk singer Katie McGarrigle. Her older brother is the flamboyant Rufus, arguably the most luminous of the constellation. They’ve performed as a family, they’ve been interviewed as a family, and they’re uncommonly open in speech and song. And having all these Wainwrights in the same story means you end up referring to them by their first name, further enhancing the aura of familiarity.

The result is a hefty novel’s worth of coverage, one that keeps expanding to more and more unwieldy lengths. If you want to know more, Google is your friend. Better, perhaps, to ask if Martha has ever wanted to be on the other end of the notebook or microphone, asking a journalist what their family is like, or what their relationship is with their brother?

“No, well, I’m not really interested,” she says, cracking up. “I don’t know why people are so interested in my family – we must be interesting. I guess we sort of stand out because we work together as a family as well, and there aren’t that many examples of the sort of dynastic thing that we have.”

It’s not just dynastic. Besides the luminaries that are blood relations, the family has a level of well-connectedness that borders on the ridiculous. Mention a gathering that includes Nick Cave, Emmylou Harris and Leonard Cohen and for most people that’s the beginning of a pretty decent festival. For the Wainwrights, that’s breakfast. And never mind dirty laundry, a phrase that always seems to indicate the revelation of irredeemable messes – this family uses music as their washing machine.

Case in point is a song by her father called I’d Rather Be Lonely, about a woman for whom Martha always felt sorry. Until the day he told an audience that it was about his daughter. Her response was the lovingly caustic Bloody Mother F—ing Asshole, which swoops and soars and has one of the best lines to ever open a song: “Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore.”

Read more.

First, two appetisers:

“Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)” – Zadie Smith

“…Hollywood film-making continues to worship at the altar of the 18 to 25-year-old male and his penis.” – Helen Mirren

And we’re off.

10. The King’s Speech

The pre-Oscar gongs it has picked up has made The King’s Speech a favourite by virtue of precedent, and a testament to the success of formula. It’s an excellent movie, but a very safe one – rakish, raffish rogue bridges the class divide? An unlikely friendship between a prince and a pilgrim? There’s very little original here, but that criticism could also be applied to Star Wars. There’s no debate that it is entertaining, but what is truly outstanding are the performances. Geoffrey Rush puts on a mischievous masterclass in telling the truth and nothing but the truth but not the whole truth, Helena Bonham Carter reassures her agent that she has the ability to play characters that are not completely batty, and Colin Firth’s claustrophobic, corseted turn has everyone in the theatre aching to finish his sentences before revelling in the magnificently cathartic finale. Buoyed by the quality of this trio, The King’s Speech is very, very close to proving that masterpieces can be painted by the numbers.

9. Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass is bright and brash and brutal, a Technicolor celebration and deconstruction of the comic-book film so complete that it probably heralds the beginning of the end for the genre. It’s a very self-aware film – a joke about Wolverine, for instance, arrives precisely one beat before you make the inevitable connection yourself – and the screen version takes a welcome third-act detour away from the nihilism of the Mark Millar-penned source material. Most of the violence and the best-delivered profanities come courtesy of 11-year-old Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz, also brilliant in Let Me In). Her age means the film can steer clear of sexualisation and instead fetishise the violence she dishes out, just long enough to ask its audience to decide at what point that violence goes too far. But just as things get too uncomfortable, a bout of heroics saves the day, leaving you entertained but questioning whether or not you should be. It’s an intriguing aftertaste, one that comes on the heels of a dose of pure pleasure.

8. Exit Through The Gift Shop

If Exit Through A Gift Shop is a prank, it is a prank with enormous heart. Cobbled together from thousands of tapes and thousands more hours of footage shot by an endearingly mad street art fan by the name of Thierry Guetta, the film is many things at once – a fly-on-the-wall account of the guerilla art scene , a chance to peer under the darkened hoodie of the enigmatic Banksy, an examination of the corrupting nature of fame, and, possibly, a razor-sharp lampooning of the increasingly commoditised world of art, street or otherwise. Is it a documentary? Is it a hoax? It doesn’t matter. Banksy’s directorial debut is the sweetest form of satire, one that asks the difficult questions we still can’t quite answer (What is art? How much is it worth? And who decides these things?) at the same time as it pens a love letter to the possibility that, should enough stars align, you really can become what you love most.

7. True Grit

The brothers Coen are in love with the smell of language. This affection wafts its way into every frame of True Grit, and it’s evident in every ripe, juicy line of dialogue. In fact, the only way to get away with a character like Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn, mumbling and slurring his way through the film, is to make sure what he’s saying is good enough for the audience to make the effort to hear it. Playing alongside him is an almost-unrecognisable Matt Damon, adding another entry to a Christopher Walken-esque repertoire of quirky characters while understanding that his place is in the background. Damon and Bridges show admirable restraint, perhaps knowing they haven’t a chance of winning the screen away from 14-year-old revelation Hailee Stenfield, whose omission from the Best Actress nominations is unfathomable – load-bearing walls are supporting structures too, but without them all is dust and rubble. Her performance is lent further heft by True Grit‘s coda, which reveals two things missing from the life of Stenfield’s character that would be sacrilegious to mention. The first, more obvious, is the consequence of her actions; the second, I would like to believe, is nothing more than her own choice.

6. Inception

Christopher Nolan is surely the best in his field at inventing sandboxes. Memento was structured in the same way its amnesiac lead pieced together the truth, The Prestige was built (and delivered) like a magic trick, and Inception manages to be impossibly taut despite being constructed from giddy strands of dream logic. Nolan knows that the most fun part of an adventure film is in finding out what the rules are, because the loving establishment of those rules makes it all the more entertaining to see them bent or broken later. When you’re debating the developments of a plot that takes place in a dream within a dream within a dream, consider that the basis for your arguments is one that Nolan has designed in its entirety. Add to that his usual spectacular cast, with the ever-precocious Ellen Page, a tough, nimble Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy having a ball and a splendidly surly Ken Watanabe. And then there’s that final shot, less an unanswered question and more a comment about what ceases be important (or exist) when dreams come true.

5. The Secret In Their Eyes

Texture this fine is rare. This is a film that works in layers – it is as much a murder mystery as it is a love story, as much a discussion of the nature of obsession as it is about the pitfalls of passion. And it is further steeped in the layers of social strata that made up Argentina in the 1970s, a class division as jagged and sore as any caste system. The performances are rich, the script surprisingly funny, the scene shot in a football stadium one of the most exhilarating technical accomplishments in cinema. The Secret In Their Eyes takes all these ingredients and simmers them down to a final promise, all the more shocking for its muted revelation, which is not about justice but about equality – an eye for an eye, and a truth for a truth.

4. How To Train Your Dragon

The Pixar formula is simple, really – story comes first. It’s something that the Dreamworks crew haven’t quite figured out, mainly due to an obsession with celebrity voice talent, but signs that this attitude was changing were at last realised with How To Tame Your Dragon. This is the tale of a boy whose intellectual gifts are wasted in a militant community that seems to exist only to repel the regular predations of dragons, a boy who, as the title suggests, befriends the most deadly of the flying critters. It delivers rapid-fire jokes, both audible and visible, in the way we have come to expect from a lot of American comedy, but it tempers the funny in a slowly flowing river of aching loneliness inhabited by man and beast alike. It is wonderful to see how their friendship translates into education, how education evolves into practical application, and how there are times when the little triumphs of that application matter not a jot to dreams of status and success when viewed through the eyes of peers or parents. It provides the most compelling argument for 3D since last year’s Avatar – even before any of its characters take flight, How To Train Your Dragon soars.

3. Toy Story 3

If the creators of Japanese animation ever regarded their chosen medium as having built-in limitations, they stopped caring long ago. Perhaps their counterparts across the Pacific are edging closer to that mindset, for Toy Story 3 embraces the concept of mortality with the same splendid grace that anime has done for most of the 20th century. There have been 11 years since the last installation in the series, but it’s Pixar, so there is far more in this film’s tank than nostalgia. Newcomers will enjoy the gentle humour and the subtleties of emotion turned into unsubtle (but never less than lovely) Randy Newman songs, and veterans will be delighted to examine how time has had its wanton way with the characters; some are the same, some are different, some are gone. But most remarkable is the film’s message, one which has not been as overtly broadcast in American cinema since Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain – that acceptance can be more courageous than resistance, that change is as important as it is hard, and that there can be no new beginnings without endings. Instead of raging against the dying of the light, Toy Story 3 tells us that it’s okay to turn it off for a little while, because that’s the only way someone can come along and turn it back on.

2. Black Swan

This is the film that Darren Aronofsky has been threatening to make his entire life. The idea had been percolating for more than a decade, time enough for the actors to train to be en pointe and for Aronofsky to hone the razor-sharp lashings of horrors psychological and biological. A perverse intimacy stalks Black Swan, brought to life by the fantasies of an deranged and delighted Natalie Portman and, occasionally, by Mila Kunis, practically playing herself. The tension is almost unbearable, but it’s hard to look away as Portman lusts after approval of different varieties, the male and the maternal and the self. This is the same car-crash fascination usually devoted to the most devoted of athletes and performers, who obsess and self-mutilate for their sport or art so that we don’t have to. Enter Portman, doing her best impression of Icarus, flying too far too fast in a quest to see which she can lose first – her virginity, or her soul.

1. The Social Network

Before you read anything anyone writes about this film, this is required reading. Then consider Aaron Sorkin’s bold declaration that he wants his fidelity to be storytelling, not to the truth. Shawn Fanning invented Napster, Sean Parker was just his business partner. And of course there’s Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s long-term girlfriend, whose onscreen presence would render The Social Network‘s emotional core completely inert. The best bit? None of those things make any difference. The dialogue still sizzles in direct contrast to the icy filters through which it was filmed. The title is still delightfully subtle, its irony only revealed by the depths of isolation on display and the desperation with which female companionship is sought. And The Social Network still captures, like no other film has before, the lightning-in-a-bottle appeal of the internet – the electric tang of possibilities limited only by imagination, the sheer excitement of traversing the last frontier for opportunity, the realisation that we are caught in a tidal wave of change and not a single person alive knows where it will end up. The Social Network isn’t about where that wave is now, what it means to generations rapidly running out of letters of the alphabet, or about predicting which far-off beach will be its eventual destination. It’s about how anyone can build a better surfboard – and how the most advanced of technology can be catalysed and abused by the most basic of desires.

And the best of the rest:

11. Fair Game

12. 127 Hours

13. Somewhere

14. The Ghost Writer

15. Monsters

16. Boy

17. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I

18.The Illusionist

19. Four Lions

20. Never Let Me Go

And here’s last year’s edition.