The Auckland leg of the New Zealand International Film Festival is merely a skip and a jump away (it’s currently a quarter past a hop), which means I’m really bloody busy and even bloody slacker getting this month’s list out. But hey, there’s still some June left, so I’m technically OK, right?
This month, I’m gifted a suggestion by animation filmmaker Mata Freshwater, director of two highly-praised animated 48Hours films (I mentioned one of them last year) as well as the short film Shmeat – which has been selected by Lee Tamahori to play as part of New Zealand’s Best 2016 at this year’s NZIFF.
#22 Crush | co-written and directed by Alison Maclean
“There was a brief moment in my naive tween years where I would’ve said that I disliked New Zealand film (which I am super ashamed of) but Crush was one of those formative films that helped to remove my cultural cringe and change my perspective. It was amazing to see the classic Kiwi road-trip and moody New Zealand unease, intertwined with femininity, identity and representation. Also Maclean’s short, Kitchen Sink is always worth mentioning – it’s an absolute classic and has deeply affected my shower-drain cleaning habits. Also also, I had to mention Maclean because I’m super excited to see The Rehearsal.” – Mata Freshwater
See On Demand options for ‘Crush’
#23 Eden | co-written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
What’s better than a good biopic on Daft Punk? How about the story of the other guy who had to set up his turntable under their cold, dark shadow for 20 years? That’s roughly what Hansen-Løve’s film explores, managing to capture the fleeting quality of music and music creation better than a lot of other biopics that focus on recognisable stars.
Split down the middle into two distinct decades, the first section parallels the impulsive fever of the emerging ’90s electronic dance scene with the impulsive fever of being young and doing lots of drugs up your nose. The second section takes place after the new millennium, where the cold light of age and reality crash in like a bucket of water on a very hungover face.
Eden works as both a slice-of-life drama and an ode to a significant turning point in popular music (the use of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo is gorgeous). The ending is incredibly French, in an artsy-fartsy sort of way, but hammers the nail so solidly in the decaying wood that you can’t accuse it of being pretentious.
(Mia Hansen-Løve also directed Things to Come, which is playing at NZIFF 2016.)
See DVD and On Demand options for ‘Eden’
#24 Sleeping With Other People | written and directed by Leslye Headland
Romantic comedy is one of my favourite movie genres, but finding good ones has often left me digging for gems in a minefield. Hell, I’ll settle for ‘rom-competent’ if that means we’re not bogged down by another whirlwind of tumbleweed rom-coms that earn their own film solely dedicated to pointing out their clichés. Thank goodness for Leslye Headland, then, whose film entered a vacant scene like a reply on my Tinder profile.
Headland puts Alison Brie (Community) and Jason Sudeikis (Horrible Bosses) together as Lainey and Jake, a grounded – yet charismatic – pair who once swapped their V-plates in college. Years later, they reunite as platonic pals to help each other out with their sexual woes: she’s cheated on her former partner heaps of times while he can’t seem to escape the shallow end of the relationship pool.
It may not be the feminist juggernaut that Trainwreck was last year (Jake mansplaining female masturbation to Lainey seems a tad strange), but Other People feels more honest and laid-back with its ideas of casual sex in the modern age. There is also a verbal smorgasbord of dick jokes, hole jokes, and dick-going-into-hole jokes that worked just dandy for me.
See Blu-ray and On Demand options for ‘Sleeping With Other People’
#25 Breathe | co-written and directed by Mélanie Laurent
Jumping from acting to filmmaking, Laurent created a crushing coming-of-ager as her second directorial feature. The premise seems typical of the genre at first: a secluded teenager becomes attached to a lively-yet-troubled new girl at school. You’d then expect the pair to work out their problems together, perhaps over an impromptu road trip or during a tipsy heart-to-heart with Imagine Dragons playing in the background, but no – things get ultra fucked up and stirred around in a raw, emotionally rugged stew bubbling with adolescent rivalry and toxic insecurity. This refusal to steer away from the fiendish side of frail friendships embeds Breathe with an unsettling sense of reality that helps land its uncomfortable conclusion.
(Mélanie Laurent also co-directed Tomorrow, which is playing at NZIFF 2016.)
#26 Strange Days | directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Before Hardcore Henry, Enter the Void, and that one scene from the Doom movie, Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow did the first-person thing with style AND purpose back in 1995 with Strange Days. Set in a near-future 1999 where memories and emotions are recorded from the subject’s perspective, Bigelow gets so much thematic (and action-centric) mileage out of the concept that it’s easy to forgive the film for being a bit too long and a bit too wacko with its romantic subplot.
Now that we’re in a world where GoPros and the Oculus Rift exist in the mass market, it becomes even more fascinating to look back at Strange Days. It’s an untouchable time capsule film that made a prediction on virtual reality in the same way Videodrome did for VHS, DVDs, Blu-rays and consumable home media in general.
The late, great Roger Ebert put it so finely in his review: It’s fascinating the way Bigelow is able to suggest so much of VR’s impact (and dangers) within a movie – a form of VR that’s a century old. As the character Faith observes: “One of the ways movies are still better than playback – the music comes up, and you know it’s over.”
The list of #52FilmsByWomen continues with…
February (including one pick from Deathgasm producer Morgan Leigh Stewart)
March (including one pick from NewsHub’s Kate Rodger)
April (including one pick from Sunday director Michelle Joy Lloyd)
May (including one pick from professional film geek Sarah McMullan)
