It's soon time for Auckland biggest cinema bash, the international film festival. PETER CALDER takes a sneak look at this year's line-up.
Film festival fans are in store for a good dose of midwinter cheer to judge by the list of titles confirmed for the annual celluloid feasts.
Promising comedies - including
one about soccer directed by a Bhutanese Buddhist lama - are notable features of the programme for the festivals, which this year will play in 10 cities the length of the country.
The programme's characteristically heavyweight lineup looks to be leavened by a good stirring of comedy this year. Topping the bill is Mary Harron's adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' 1991 bestseller American Psycho which is, by all reports, less violent than we might have feared and a good deal funnier than we might have hoped.
It's a safe bet that The Cup (in Bhutanese with English subtitles) is the first feature directed by a Tibetan Buddhist lama, and equally likely that it will be one of the festival's most unusual crowdpleasers. The story of a group of young monks who must conspire to get the World Cup broadcast beamed into their Himalayan monastery, it has charmed some of the Northern Hemisphere's hardest-to-please critics.
More mainstream is High Fidelity, based on the Nick Hornby novel about one of love's losers. Hornby fans might flinch that it has been transposed from London to Chicago, but Variety called John Cusack's performance in the title role "ferociously funny" and the direction of Stephen Frears "cunningly graceful."
The 112-film programme includes movies from favourite directors from earlier festivals. Jim Jarmusch is back with his "gangster, hip-hop, samurai eastern western" Ghost Dog and Claire Denis, author of the sublime Chocolat, is back in Africa with Beau Travail, which transposes Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion station in Djibouti.
There are new films from Chinese maestros Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou and from Frenchman Patrice Leconte, as well as last year's controversial winner of the Cannes Palme D'Or, Bruno Dumont's Humanity.
The festival is always rich in non-fiction films and a clutch of excellent documentaries suggest this year will be one of the best yet. I'm most excited by Lighthouse, the new film from the makers of the mesmerising Atlantic in 1995, and Crazy, in which festival regular Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann focuses on veterans of United Nations peacekeeping missions. But The Legacy, which untangles the mess created by California's "three-strikes-and-you're-out" sentencing law; Long Night's Journey Into Day, a Sundance champion about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Me and Isaac Newton, Michael Apted's conversations with scientists; and Mobutu, a portrait of Zaire's ruthless kleptocrat; are a few of what look like a compelling lineup.
Music fans are equally well catered for, notably with The Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple's chronicle of punk legends the Sex Pistols. And Princess Mononoke, a Japanese animated action film, is regarded as a landmark of the genre.
As always, the festival provides a window on cinema's past as well and this year flash new prints of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Carol Reed's fabulous The Third Man, the legendary The Wizard of Oz, and the Beatles classic Yellow Submarine are on show, along with a retrospective of Max Ophuls, whose output from the early 1930s practically invented - and certainly defined - the tracking shot.
Local inclusions include The Price of Milk by Harry (Topless Women) Sinclair, a Barry Barclay documentary about the Moriori, Vaness Alexander's Magik and Rose, and Grant Lahood's Numero Bruno, a documentary about the late, and much-missed, Bruno Lawrence.
* The 32nd Auckland International Film Festival programme runs from July 7 to 23 at the Civic, Sky City Theatre and Queen St cinemas.
The programme is out on June 12 and bookings open June 14. Subsequent festival start dates in the North Island are: Wellington (July 14), Palmerston North (August 3), Hamilton (August 10) Napier (August 17), Tauranga (August 24).
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Film details, schedules, bookings
A funnier, frendlier film festival
It's soon time for Auckland biggest cinema bash, the international film festival. PETER CALDER takes a sneak look at this year's line-up.
Film festival fans are in store for a good dose of midwinter cheer to judge by the list of titles confirmed for the annual celluloid feasts.
Promising comedies - including
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