Cinema

CINEMA Going back to the future, but just for the fun of it

“La Belle Epoque” (M) How would you like to experience living in a time past of your choice?

That’s the underlying premise of this zany, entertaining, puzzling French movie that’s sometimes comedy, other times drama. The second film written and directed by Nicolas Bedos delivers all those elements at breakneck speed, sometimes confusing, never disappointing.

Antoine (Guillaume Canet, who wrote and directed “We’ll End Up Together” which opened here on August 6) has a way to separate wealthy people from memories they’d prefer to forget.

For a big bunch of money, he will engage actors and wardrobe masters and stage technicians to recreate the past in La Belle Epoque restaurant.

The internet is eroding the professional comfort zone of artist Victor (Daniel Auteuil) whose wife Marianne (Fanny Ardant) detests him and loses no opportunity to remind him so. Victor asks Antoine to take him back to the 1970s, when the sexual revolution had achieved a measure of stability and Victor met Margot (Doria Tillier) the love of his life. Antoine’s response forms the principal body of the film.

It’s fun. The actors playing the four principal characters are great and so are those whom Antoine engages to deliver the time shift. The story’s sometimes bitty flow turns out not to be so much a defect as an affectionate challenge to the audience to keep up with what Bedos is Daniel Auteuil as artist Victor in “La Belle Epoque”.

inviting us to enjoy.

At Dendy and Palace Electric

“Made in Italy” (M) THE cost of engaging Irish-born Liam Neeson to act in a movie has been known to reach eight significant digits.

We in Australia know him only by his movies. In Britain and the US, he’s a stage actor as much as he is one whose movie castings (133 credits) are as ready to use his gravelly voice just as a narrator as much as his 193-centimetre height.

In “Made In Italy”, he plays Robert, an artist whose painting career is stalled and whose spirit is depressed. His son Jack (played by his real-life son Micheal Richardson from his late wife Natasha Richardson) owns a London art gallery in partnership with a wife in a loveless marriage. Jack would like to buy her out. Sale of the family home in Tuscany will provide the necessary capital.

That house has not been occupied for two decades. It needs renovation big time. So Jack takes his father along to help prepare it for the sale.

That’s the narrative framework for this film that doesn’t match its often lovely visuals with the dramatic cohesion that it needs, deserves but doesn’t always get. That’s the reason for only two stars.

Writer/director James D’Arcy pals Jack up with Natalia (Valeria Bilello) in a relationship that as soon as we meet her we know will end as it does. Robert still mourns a wife who died in a road accident when Jack was a child. Her place in his life is taken cautiously by realestate agent Kate whose function in the story is less than actress Lindsay Duncan deserves but as up close and friendly as Robert needs.

I’ve no idea how much Neeson charged to play Robert. Or how much the whole movie cost to make. After its opening week in the US, its cumulative worldwide gross takings totalled $US176,498. I didn’t think it was that rancid.

At Dendy, Palace Electric and Hoyts Belconnen

“Force of Nature” (MA) SET in Puerto Rico, the film begins with an altercation about Afro-American Griffin (William Catlett) who’s trying to buy all the mince meat in a supermarket fridge for a pet named Janet.

When a category five storm hits the island territory, job-weary cop Cardillo (Emile Hirsch) together with female cop Jess Peña (Stephanie Cayo) is sent to supervise the evacuation of an apartment building. Griffin lives in that building. So does ailing retired cop Ray (Mel Gibson) whose medico daughter Troy (Kate

WATCH IT! / streaming and stuff

Bosworth) is trying to persuade him to leave. And there is an old man of European extraction who refuses to leave.

To this mix of good people needing evacuation from the building, add trigger-happy psychopath John the Baptist (David Zayas) and his bunch of villains carrying military-grade long arms that they use on anybody they don’t like. What in the building is so valuable that they are prepared to slaughter innocent bystanders to acquire?

Around that collection of characters and environments, director Michael Polish sets about telling a small collection of stories comprising the feature-film debut screenplay of Cory Miiller.

It’s a copybook application of the dramatic unities (place, time, environment, people) with rising and falling tensions and the weather’s embrace never far from the action.

Those three stars at the top of this review are down principally to Mel Gibson who dies usefully and gracefully. And Janet. Remember Griffin’s pet Janet? When John the Baptist has all the good folk at his mercy, she’ll save the day. It’s only a two-second appearance but an effective one, only minutes before the film ends and worth waiting for.

At Dendy and Hoyts

sundayROAST

Stay in touch with the names making news on Sundays from 10am as 2CC and “CityNews” present Canberra’s only local weekend news and current affairs program. It’s a revolving panel show that brings to the microphone great “CityNews” commentators and 2CC personalities.

Be part of the conversation call 6255 1206 between 10am and noon

Craving a slice of ‘cosmic horror’

By Nick OVERALL

FOXTEL Binge, one of the newest streaming services in Australia, is set to stir up August’s competition with one of the biggest new shows this year: “Lovecraft Country”.

There’s a good chance the name “Lovecraft” rings a bell, even if you might not be exactly sure why.

Howard Phillips (HP) Lovecraft wrote strange and terrifying tales for American pulp science-fiction magazines of the 1920s and ‘30s, and was responsible for the wide popularisation of a sub-genre known as “cosmic horror”.

Unlike the more famous horror tales of the 19th century, which would go on to see names such as Edgar Allan Poe still widely known today, Lovecraft shifted from the psychological and gothic, to the existential and unknown.

He found terror in the idea of humanity’s insignificance when placed in comparison to the universe around us. His stories focused on parallel dimensions, dream worlds, strange cults, alien civilisations and, most notably, god-like creatures “Lovecraft Country”... one of the biggest new shows this year.

from beneath the ocean.

Most famous of his stories is “The Call of Cthulhu” (try pronouncing that one), which created one of the most influential monsters of all time. Cthulhu is a gigantic, cosmic entity that sleeps at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, that waits to awaken and end the world. Mind you, nice and close to Australia, which is actually one of the major settings of the story. Looks like we’re first on the chopping block. Thanks, Howard.

They are fascinatingly weird and riveting tales. What’s amazing about Lovecraft’s work though is how much of it has slithered into modern popular culture.

Countless authors and directors have been captivated by his works. Stephen King cites the author as being one of his most prominent influences. King’s widely popular stories like “It” are doused in Lovecraftian inspiration.

Now HBO has produced a new show capitalising on this resurgence of fascination with the author. Here we enter “Lovecraft Country”, based on a 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff.

Rather than adopting the setting of New England, the backdrop of most of Lovecraft’s stories, this new show moves the plot into the deep south of America in the 1950s, aiming to put a modern twist on the source material.

Despite his creativity, the young Lovecraft was viciously racist, with a very open fear of foreigners. Though I personally don’t think this takes away from what the writer has offered fiction and literature, the way his works are examined has changed with a modern perspective.

“Lovecraft Country” looks to be a show that wants to tackle such an examination head on, by weaving together a story of the monsters that lurk within the pages of Lovecraft’s tales, as well as illuminates the terrible racism endured by people living in the era of racial segregation.

The story follows Atticus Black, an African American war veteran and sci-fi enthusiast who must travel across America in search of his missing father. This bold combination of ideas has the potential to offer a unique turn and astute perspective of Lovecraftian horror. The previews have seen it awash with critical praise.

This is personally one of my most anticipated series of the year as a long-time mega fan of Lovecraft’s work who is also confronted by the extremism of some of his attitudes. I think it’s the most famous of his quotes that illuminates both the psychology of Lovecraft, and what’s found in his writing better than anything else: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”