New Hayes film screens
Hunger wins inaugural filmfest prize
The curious case of new Blanchett film
Cannes prize for young Aussie director
Tassie girl is one to watch
Cate Blanchett turns evil
Watts new in new Veil version?
ACTOR/director Anthony Hayes is coming up with a new film, Ten Empty, which is planned to start screening this month.
The film tells the story of a disillusioned son's trip home complicated when 10 years of family secrets explode over one weekend.
The title is said to refer to the number of canvasses the mother in the film is given to paint as part of psychological cognitive therapy.
In the Ten Empty cast are Daniel Frederiksen, Geoff Morrell, Lucy Bell, Brendan Cowell and Jack Thompson.
Hayes wrote and directed New Skin and Sweet Dreams in 2002.
Hunger
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Three Blind Mice
UK FILMMAKER Steve McQueen's Hunger has won the inaugural Sydney Film Prize at this year's Sydney Film Festival.
Australian competition entry Three Blind Mice, directed by Matthew Newton, received special commendation from the jury.
This year's Sydney Film Festival was the first Australian festival to have an internationally accredited official competition. The Sydney Film Prize is worth $60,000.
Twelve films were in official competition at the festival, the two Australian entries being Three Blind Mice and Nash Edgerton's The Square.
The Sydney Film Festival closed on June 22 with a screening of Marjane Strapi's animated feature Persepolis. Opening night film was the Australian premiere of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky.
An eclectic mix of Australian films, including co-productions with other countries, featured in the Australian strand of this year's film festival which was divided into several strands, including Australian and world films, documentaries, shorts, digital innovations, and talks and forums.
Other Australian films which screened at the festival included Children of the Silk Road, a China-Australia-Germany co-production; End of the Rainbow, a France-Australia co-production; The Eternity Man, a filmed opera on "Eternity" man Arthur Stace; Lake Mungo on how the dead haunt the living; River of No Return on a Yolngo girl who wanted to be an actress like Marilyn Monroe.
Festival venues included the State Theatre, Metro Theatre, Greater Union George Street and Dendy Opera Quays.
ACTUALLY it's the story of the new Cate Blanchett film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that is not only curious but, well, impossible to believe.
It's a love story about Blanchett's movie character and co-star Brad Pitt's title character.
The film is directed by David Fincher (Panic Room and the more recent Zodiac) and begins in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918, into the 21st century, following Button's journey that is as unusual as any man's life can be.
The film is adapted from a 1920s story by F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) about a man, Benjamin Button, who is born in his 80s and begins to age backwards.
At age 50, he falls in love with a 30-year-old woman, Blanchett. And then must come to terms with the relationship as they literally grow in opposite directions.
YOUNG Australian director Julius Avery has won the Jury Prize for short films at the Cannes Film Festival.
His film, Jerrycan, is about a teenager in rural Victoria who risks everything after being bullied into making a life and death decision.
Jerrycan is said to have been based on Avery's childhood and used locals instead of actors.
Avery, 29, is from Prahran in inner Melbourne.
Rachael Taylor in Shutter
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SHE was Miss Teen Tasmania in 1998, received a Logie nomination for most popular new female talent in 2006 for her work in Headland, and stars in Shutter currently screening in Australia.
Launceston-born Rachael Taylor is certainly an actor on the ascendancy. It is to be hoped she is no shooting star streaking across the sky before being lost to us.
She spent three and a half months in Japan for her role in Shutter where a newly married couple (Taylor and Joshua Jackson) discover disturbing, ghostly images in photographs they develop after a tragic accident.
Fearing the manifestations may be connected, they investigate and learn that some mysteries may have been better left unsolved.
Shutter is based on a 2004 Thai film which like the Japanese film The Ring has been given the Hollywood treatment. The English version is directed by Masayuki Ochiai who makes his English-language directorial debut with this film.
Cate Blanchett in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
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TO each of her film roles, Cate Blanchett has brought a diversity and depth of performance that has seen her in various movie heroine roles that were of people somehow flawed in varying degrees but heroines nonetheless.
She now turns villain in an adventure thriller, the fourth of the Indiana Jones movies by Steven Spielberg.
In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Cate Blanchett is Soviet agent Spalko who pits physicality and prowess against Harrison Ford's older and wiser Indiana Jones.
In a story co-written by George Lucas, archeologist Jones is called back into action when he becomes entangled in a Soviet plot regarding the mysterious artefacts known as the Crystal Skuills.
Also in the film are Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt and Ray Winstone.
Naomi Watts in The Painted Veil |
THERE was the 1934 film, The Painted Veil, based on W Somerset Maugham's novel about infidelity and redemption but the most that was going for it seemed to have been the presence of Greta Garbo. In 1957 it was remade as The Seventh Sin with Eleanor Parker as the unfaithful one.
We now have another remake and the new The Painted Veil stars Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.
The Painted Veil is a love story set in the 1920s and tells the story of a young English couple, Walter (Norton), a middle-class doctor, and Kitty (Watts), an upper-class woman, who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with someone else.
When he uncovers her infidelity, in an act of vengeance, he accepts a job in a remote village in China ravaged by a deadly epidemic, and takes her along.
Their journey brings meaning to their relationship and gives them purpose in one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.
thesydneyscene is published weekly except in the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January.
Copyright 2008 Larry Rivera
