My second week at the Melbourne International Film Festival saw far fewer films. I was never planning too see as many in the second week, but a couple I had planned to see fell by the wayside. Haivng not been that impressed by The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I couldn’t get that interested in Zizek, a film about Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek (and besides, that was the night Essendon beat the Lions). However, I did regret that circumstances meant I missed The Host, a Korean creature feature that I had been looking forward to greatly. So in the end, week two amounted to a measly two films.
A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)
The latest film from living legend Robert Altman is, aptly enough, an old man’s Nashville. And that’s fine. It’s not great, but it’s very enjoyable in a homely, self-indulgent kind of way. It covers the fictional final night of a real radio show, Garrison Keillor’s folksy variety show A Prairie Home Companion. I imagine fans of the real show will get a lot out of this, and certainly by the end of the film I was interested in Keillor’s show. Keillor has a deep, honey-coated voice, and you can hear how he has thrived on radio, but he turns out to be a natural on screen too, with a subdued hangdog manner that’s effortlessly comical. There’s a strange metaphysical subplot that didn’t quite come off – only someone with Altman’s cachet could have gotten away with it to the extent that he did – and the usual array of fantastic performances that you expect in an Altman film. Kevin Kline, in particular, steals the film as Guy Noir, a wannabe hard-boiled detective who seems to exist in his own time period, marked off from the others by his fantasy world. It’s one of those great supporting parts that cries out for its own film (like Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau in the original Pink Panther). All in all it’s a good way to warm up for the season of vintage Altman at ACMI in coming weeks.
This Film is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick)
Kirby Dick’s documentary about the MPAA’s ratings’ board (which administers the highly unsatisfactory American ratings system) is very entertaining, but not very hard hitting. Dick – who is the spitting image of Ted Danson – talks to a lot of filmmakers who have run foul of the system, and makes some good points. His strongest ground is in attacking the secrecy in which the board operates (they don’t reveal who their members are), and he gets some good cheap laughs by hiring private investigators to identify them. Yet this central, structuring stunt reveals the problem with his approach: sure, he finds the names, but he doesn’t tell you anything meaningful about them. What are their backgrounds? Their other jobs (if any)? What social or political views do they bring to their work as raters? We learn nothing at all, really, about the members of the ratings board, and only at the very end get the names and other jobs of the appeals board (a separate group of people). We are left to ponder ourselves the implications of the fact that most of the latter work for theatre chains or distributors: a more serious-minded filmmaker would have explored this further.