cinema Reviews
ENTERTAINMENT
BY JOHN CAMPBELL
MARCEL MARCEAU, MAYONNAISE & ME
KONG: SKULL ISLAND I can’t remember the last time I stood for the national anthem before a movie, but it happened at Pondicherry today. A deluxe ticket with 3D glasses cost the princely sum of 120 rupees (little more than two dollars) and with the heat and humidity, the noise and clamour of Tamil Nadu outside, the Ratna Theatre seemed a good bet. The audience was 99 per cent blokes and the air-con sub-zero, but the samosas at interval were delish (can’t remember the last interval, either) and the movie was a cracker, notwithstanding the fact that it was dubbed in Tamil. Film being primarily a visual medium, it should never be too difficult, especially in an adventure flick such as this, to follow what’s going on. A GI is fighting a Jap on Skull Island in 1943 – then cut to 1973. John Goodman is planning an expedition to the island (I concede – I didn’t grasp his motive) and he enlists the aid of Samuel L Jackson and a bunch of hardened Vietnam soldiers. With a professor type and a pretty Girl in a singlet, they sail to their destiny. The first BIG scene with Kong has the great ape attacking Goodman’s fleet of helicopters – it is Apocalypse Now all over again, only this time with the Valkyries having the tripe beaten out of them. It really is a fantastically well executed sequence, especially in 3D. Jackson’s character takes an immediately vengeful attitude to Kong, but you can tell that the Girl, photographing everything she sees, including the natives, will be touched by Kong’s innocence. Without comprehensible dialogue, the story looks like nothing more than a bunch of guys with guns destroying a pristine environment. Pretty quickly it turns into a case of the viewer guessing who will be devoured next by the other giant creatures that live on the island (we all know the Girl will make it) while hoping that Kong doesn’t suffer the same fate as his namesake who fell from the Empire State Building. A mighty movie – if you like that sort of thing.
LOGAN If you attend the cinema on a regular, professional basis, you can easily fool yourself into believing that you have become immune to the medium’s more gross and ugly indulgences. Some filmmakers appear only to want to confront and shock, but you learn to take them in your stride – in the end, it’s only smoke and mirrors and tomato sauce after all. But this latest derivative of the Marvel comic genre is particularly horrible. The very opening sequence has the Wolverine, Logan (Hugh Jackman), being pushed just a little too far by a gang of hoods who are nicking his car, resulting in his doing his block and shredding them with the hideous steel knives that protrude from between his knuckles. Of course, the violence and bloodshed is perfectly acceptable because superheroes only unleash their powers on baddies who really deserve it – Marvel morality is such mindless crap, isn’t it? There is an old scientist (Patrick Stewart – a fine actor with a well-earned payday for participating in dross) who has been in hiding whom Logan must protect, and there is a nasty piece of work, Doctor Rice (Richard E Grant), out to get them. Enter a little girl who also happens to be a mutant, Laura (Dafne Keen). She is not just any old mutant kid, however; she is Logan’s daughter, and she has inherited the slashing fists. There was a savagery about Laura’s attacks that I found genuinely nightmarish. She would leap on her victim with shrieks from Bosch’s Hell and plunge her bladed fists repeatedly into the poor bugger. Her efforts, combined with Logan’s thrusting his through skulls and necks – there are not one, but two decapitations – were enough to turn my stomach. It is alarming and unspeakably depressing that this crock of vileness, with its bogus profundity and hateful self-importance, is currently rating 8.6 on the IMdB popularity scale. If you want a quick summary of what is wrong with the world, just check it out and look around you – there are people who find this entertaining.
I N M O N S I E U R M AYO N N A I S E A U ST R A L I A N A RT I ST A N D FILMMAKER PHILIPPE MORA I N V E ST I G AT E S H I S FAT H E R’S C L A N D E ST I N E RO L E I N T H E F R E N C H R É S I STA N C E I N W W I I A N D H I S M OT H E R’S M I R AC U LO U S E S C A P E E N RO U T E TO A U S C H W I T Z . What inspired you to find out about the stories of your parents? Kids always are curious about what their parents don’t want them to know. Although this changed later, in my early days my parents, like many Holocaust survivors, simply did not want to talk about it. It was still too raw. So I started collecting information; Marcel Marceau, who visited us regularly as a wartime and postwar friend of both my parents, was very forthcoming with information. He had been my dad’s colleague in the Résistance and my mum’s teacher in Paris. What were the challenges along the way? The challenge is to understand why the Holocaust occurred. There are many unanswered questions. Some I will address in a new film Day and Sunlight. This is an ongoing investigation and we keep finding incredible things. For example, my great-aunt Charlotte in Breslau published a thesis in 1915 on Nietsche. Very unusual for a woman then, let alone a Jewish woman. She was murdered in Auschwitz. Why is mayonnaise significant in this story? It’s the MacGuffin with some punch. A variation on it became my father’s codename and nickname in the Résistance per Marceau. More than that will be a spoiler for the film. Aside from anything else it’s delicious! How much did you find out about your family story from your family? Why did you need to look elsewhere to fill in the gaps? Later in life both my parents were forthcoming about what had happened in WWII. Originally as mentioned, the wounds were still wide open. Any Jewish families that survived have to have incredible stories because the odds were stacked against them. The whole thing is demonic in conception; however, the slaughter of two million children still commands my attention. On a broader canvas I studied history to to get some context, but this is a subject where the more you delve the more you are hit by the enigma and question of ‘Why?’ How does this wild story show itself in you and in your art? I have made many films that touch on and/or explore what happened in the Third Reich. Since we still do not know what happened in detail and since the effects continue, I believe there are many more films to be made about this subject, not to mention all other forms of history and creative endeavours. As a footnote, Germany just made me a German citizen, restoring the rights the Nazis illegally took away from my family in the Thirties. Monsieur Mayonnaise screens at the Bangalow A&I Hall on Saturday at 6.30pm.
34 March 22, 2017 The Byron Shire Echo
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