Crowe teams up with Scott anew
Vale Heath Ledger
Radha takes the Silk Road
Thriller/love story on a sheep farm
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
Scene from Body of Lies |
» RUSSELL Crowe has again teamed up with director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, A Good Year) in the new movie Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Body of Lies is based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius' 2007 novel about a CIA operative, Roger Ferris (DiCaprio), who uncovers a lead on a major terrorist leader suspected to be operating out of Jordan.
When Ferris devises a plan to infiltrate his network, he must first win the backing of cunning CIA veteran Ed Hoffman (Crowe) and the collegial, but perhaps suspect, head of Jordanian intelligence.
Although ostensibly his allies, Ferris questions how far he can really trust these men without putting his entire operation - and his life — on the line.
Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight |
» ONE of Heath Ledger's last film roles — that of The Joker in The Dark Knight — is now on Sydney cinema screens.
Already there's much talk of his tour de force performance in a role also filled by Jack Nicholson in an earlier Batman movie.
With his untimely death in New York in January this year, a posthumous Academy Award is being bruited about.
The actor was nominated in 2006 for his role in the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain but lost out to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.
Ledger last performed in a film role in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. He died before the film ws completed and it is said Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell would portray physically changed transformations of Ledger's character.
His film roles in Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight — and perhaps in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus — may turn out to be fitting tributes to a young man of great talent who was lost to the world far too early in his life.
Vale Heath Ledger.
Radha Mitchell |
» SHE played a demanding double role in the Woody Allen film Melinda and Melinda and was more recently seen in the Greg McLean thriller Rogue.
In Children of the Silk Road versatile Radha Mitchell takes another turn as an American nurse caught in a sweeping but intimate story set in war-torn 1930s China.
Together with a young English journalist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and the leader of a Chinese partisan group (Chow Yun Fat), the group meet in desperate and unexpected circumstances, thrown together to rescue 60 orphaned children through hundreds of miles of treacherous terrain.
Children of the Silk Road was recently screened out of competition at the Sydney Film Festival.
Monic Hendrickx and William McInnes in Unfinished Sky
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» QUEENSLAND sheep country is the place where the Peter Duncan film Unfinished Sky takes place.
In this film, Duncan transposess the Dutch box office hit The Polish Bride to the Queensland location where a sheepfarmer, John Waldring, played by William McInnes, discovers the arrival of a bruised and battered woman, Tahmeena (Monic Hendrickx), who can't speak English.
Hendrickx was in the original Dutch film and she reprises her role here as the hunted woman, subject of a police search. In self-imposed isolation on the sheep farm, Waldring is gradually drawn out of his shell by the woman who has sought refuge in his farm.
This is thriller and love story set against the rural Queensland landscape.
» ACTOR/director Anthony Hayes has come up with a new film, Ten Empty, which started screening in July.
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.
thesydneyscene is published weekly except in the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January.
Copyright 2008 Larry Rivera
