Welcome to ravemagazine.com.au the on-line home of Brisbane's leading street magazine - now with daily site updates to keep you in touch with all the latest music news, tour and gig information.
Offbeat characters, lingering shots, dappled light and understated drama, all set to a soundtrack of piano and searing violin – Terri has all the indie boxes ticked. There’s even a cameo Tim Heidecker, co-star of lo-fi TV favourite, Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Jacob Wysocki stars as Terri, a withdrawn high school student twice the width and height of his cohorts. His oddball behaviour includes living with his senile uncle in a cluttered cabin and a brief foray into mice slaughter. He also wears pyjamas to school. Why exactly, we’re never told. Neither is the how, what and why of his vanished parents or his unstable uncle. Like its namesake star, Terri is painfully reluctant to open up.
John C. Reilly gives a fantastic performance as Mr. Fitzgerald, the passionate but worn Assistant Principal. He’s a man determined to stop life’s outsiders from sliding into obscurity. In series of awkward and utterly believable scenes, Terri comes to trust Fitzgerald and gain the strength to cope in an unfeeling world. Joining him is the precocious and literally hair-pulling Chad (Bridger Zadina) and the school’s newest pariah Heather (Olivia Crocicchia). Together they form a tenuous bond. Director Azazel Jacobs has a knack for capturing the unease and moral topsy-turvy of adolescence. Every dramatic scene that could so easily slip into cliché is shot through with angst. It’s just a shame it doesn’t share more. Terri may not have depth, but the surface tension is mesmerizing.
In high school I knew an exchange student from Norway called Lars, who, for better or worse, left me with the lasting impression that Norwegians had a strange sense of humour. His answer to the inevitable mocking of his accent was simply to issue grunts and affect a bug-eyed insanity until his antagonists were too unnerved to continue, then revert to his normal state (which was still a little odd). There’s something about Troll Hunter that reminds me a bit of Lars, its easy-to-belittle ‘found footage’ conceit masking a film of deadpan hilarity. A trio of university film students investigate what are being reported as wild bear incidents by following a grizzled hunter deep into the Norwegian forests – except the hunter, Hans, isn’t hunting bears. He’s in fact a clandestine public servant charged with keeping a lid on Norway’s secret troll population. And true to their folkloric roots, Hans’s quarry are Christian-munching, giant Muppet-like monsters with bad tempers and a tendency to turn to stone or explode when exposed to sunlight. This unusual wildlife control has its fair share of downsides, like the paperwork Hans has to complete after every encounter, or the concentrated troll stench he has wear so they don’t sniff him out. It’s all dealt with straight-faced by a man who has a rather thankless job to perform, and who would be happy to see word finally get out via the bemused students. Complementing the, pardon me, droll scenario are some wonderfully realized visuals for a small genre film. More Cloverfield than Blair Witch, but in many ways more entertaining than both, Troll Hunter provides enough up-close encounters that monster fans won’t feel shortchanged. It’s a great WTF moment when the first troll appears, barging it’s way through the trees, and you’ll be right there with the students as they run for their lives, not quite sure whether to laugh or scream.
Bunraku is about a future where guns have been banned worldwide, resulting in a return to blades and fists and violence as stylised as a dance scene in a Gene Kelly musical. Two strangers come to a town straight out of a western that’s ruled by a gang called the Red Suits, whose leader is an axe-wielding tough called The Woodcutter (Ron Perlman). Those strangers are a cowboy with no name (Josh Hartnett) and a sushi restaurant samurai (Gackt) who both have reasons for wanting revenge on The Woodcutter. These strange characters and this equally strange setting are presented with a degree of flair – the backdrops flip into life like a digital pop-up book, subtitles are written in a comic book font, a sound like a roulette wheel plays whenever Hartnett adjusts his hat – but most of the time these elements are irrelevant to what’s actually happening. They’re distractions like a magician’s hand movements, designed to keep you from realising that Bunraku is actually very boring. The dialogue is nonsensical, with most scenes consisting of people uttering one-liners to show how cool they are, over and over until you want to shout at the screen that you’ve got the point already. The narration is a drag to listen to even though it’s provided by Mike Patton, full of sophomoric attempts at deepness. The action – and this is the kicker, because Bunraku is an action movie – is predictable, with the outcomes never in doubt and very little sense of danger or physicality. It tries hard to be like Kill Bill or Kung Fu Hustle, but lacks the panache and inventiveness of either. You’d be better off re-watching one of those movies instead.
Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is set at the end of the samurai age, when a group of 12 of the last noble warriors – plus one odd stranger they meet along the way – come together to assassinate the villainous Lord Naritsugu. It’s a remake of a ’60s samurai movie, but it’s also a homage to Seven Samurai. One of the main differences between this and Kurosawa’s classic is right there in the title – there’s five more guys. That does mean it can be hard to keep track of who’s who, especially when about six of the assassins have a sentence of introduction devoted to them. The standouts are Shinzaemon (Kōji Yakusho), who is looking for a noble death before he gets too old, Shinrokuro (Takayuki Yamada), a gambler addicted to taking risks, and Kiga (Yūsuke Iseya), a rough-and-tumble hunter who serves as the comic relief, like Kikuchiyo did in Seven Samurai. The other way that 13 Assassins adds more to the classic formula is in its climax, a single extended battle sequence that feels like it takes up half of the movie. Where Kurosawa had his warriors defending a village from bandits, Miike’s killers take over an entire town and then booby-trap it to create an elaborate ambush for Naritsugu and his small army of retainers. It’s a thrilling set-piece, especially when traps are being sprung left and right and men with swords are running through the streets, and 13 Assassins is worth watching for that spectacle alone.
The Kings Of Leon have attracted a lot of criticism over the past few years. Have they completely sold out with their music? Are they so volatile that they will never last? Can they move on from addiction and indulgence and continue creating music together? This documentary gives a brilliant insight into the twisted life that these men endured prior to their musical success. Growing up as the children of a travelling preacher, desperately poor and completely brainwashed by religion, the documentary pivots around the family reunion that happens for their extended family every year as well as footage that has been collected over their career. Caleb Followill’s first words in the documentary are a description of the first time he got to “second base” with a girl – that was his cousin. The three brothers shared a bed well into their teens and Nathan and Caleb shared two pairs of pants for years. They were horrendously destitute and when their mother discusses one of her proudest moments, it is when Caleb “received the Holy Spirit” and spoke in tongues. By the end of this insight into the Followill men’s lives, you are relieved they became cocaine-fuelled, hedonistic and self-absorbed rock stars as opposed to serial killers. My guess is that it could’ve gone either way.
Capturing the life and times of dottering sexagenarian and perhaps the most recognisable man in heavy metal, God Bless Ozzy Osbourne retraces the life of none other than Ozzy Osbourne. Before he was Ozzy, he was John, a troubled kid growing up in the poor industrial area of Birmingham, England and turning to alcohol and crime to escape the drudgery of everyday life. Then he became Ozzy Osbourne, the Black Sabbath frontman and bat killing rock & roll legend who turned to alcohol and drugs to escape the drudgery of being a multi-millionaire. Recounting his attempts to get sober while glorifying the myth of his hard-partying ways, the documentary focuses on Ozzy’s struggles with alcohol, cocaine and prescription medication. Watching the film recounting Ozzy’s flirtations with rehab and subsequent relapses, I find myself considering how long does a star have to be sober before his sobriety can be documented? Vince Neil published an autobiography about getting sober and finally settling down his life, then within a year he was in jail for drink driving, divorced from his wife and charged with battery and disorderly conduct. While Ozzy’s recent run of sobriety has gained more steam than his Motley Crue counter-part and the Prince Of Darkness has abstained since his MTV reality show wrapped in 2005, it seems as though it could perhaps be detrimental to celebrate such a relatively newfound strength. But if you’re not interested the documentary subject’s physical and mental state, if you just want to hear stories of carnage, tits and rock & roll madness, then God Bless Ozzy Osbourne has what you’re after in spades. Most people manage to get their shit together before they’re 60 years old. Then again, most people didn’t write songs like Iron Man and Paranoid, so you’ve got to cut Ozzy Osbourne some slack, God bless him.
(Madman)
(Madman)
(Icon)
(Icon)
(Revolver Entertainment)
(Eagle/Shock)
