'Teeth' (Melbourne Film Festival)

High school student, Dawn (played by Jess Weixler, resembling the love-child of Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet), is a goody-two-shoes promoter of waiting-til-you're married before having sex, and gives seminars to fellow students to that effect.
Unfortunately, she is also afflicted with a rare condition well-known to feminist theorists as 'vagina dentata' in which the organs denoting gender have the capacity to 'de-flower' males with whom she copulates.
This ponderous difficulty makes for a delightfully playful film, rather as if 'Election' was crossed with 'Girl's School Screamers'. A clever hybrid, rather in the way that 'Hot Fuzz' cross-fertilises 'Bad Boys 2' with 'Midsomer Murders', 'Teeth' has the droll fortitude of 'Groundhog Day' too, as the unfortunate lead drily endures their horrible position.
Dawn makes the most of her predicament, taking revenge on her brother from Hell, releasing a howl of delight from the audience, but the chief pleasure of the film is in the perfect casting of Weixler as the prim, squeaky clean girl who was happy to wait, but can't quite resist the temptation to find out what happens when...
Of course there will be those po-faced killjoys who point out that the film's underlying moral could be construed as conservative (and did so with recent frolics '40 Year Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up'): give in to lust outside marriage and you will commit a sin tantamount to grievous bodily harm, if not manslaughter.
Amazingly, there were two walkouts at the screening I went to. Some people, as we know from observing the Mormons, are defiantly committed to not enjoying themselves.
The film had the same mordantly self-satisfied tone as comic short 'Happiest Day Of My Life', also shown at the Melbourne Film Festival, an LA wedding skit, in which roles are reversed and the women adopt the parts played by men in formal marriage rites, another satirical exercise that worked through all of the enjoyable consequences of its own inversions.
The film-maker introduced the short, which we would never have otherwise seen were it not for the Festival, though Film Festivals are rarely events to be celebrated so much as endured, the enforced viewings brought about by scheduling together with the concern that many films will never be seen again, or released at all, drives you to attend screenings you would otherwise avoid and brings on that peculiar sensation, 'film festival psychosis', in which the sufferer feels tormented by the conviction that he is constantly missing something, only to give in to the blurb-writers' puff and find out that he's missing nothing at all. Also that awful sensation of sitting through films with no merit, appeal or real value at all, interminable longuers, patched together out of various exercises in pretension, searching for but failing to find the way to rouse the emotion they long to evoke, while several hundred of us wait in the dark for something to happen which never comes about, experiencing that kind of headcrushing boredom only film festivals know how to bring on, then filing out and hearing that particular kind of sniggering among the relieved audience which can only mean, 'That was awful, why did we all put up with it?' Anyone who complains is told that they don't understand 'the Asian sense of Time'. But of course we put up with it because every now and then something like 'Teeth' comes along and provides an evening of pure delight.

Woman In The Dunes (1964)

Let us pretend that this story does not happen in Japan, that it happens instead on the moon, and were it not for the occasional visitations by men who lower supplies by rope into the giant pit, we could be anywhere... Mauritania, the Gobi desert, Antarctica.
But there are certain concrete details: the village nearby has run out of water, the woman in the pit is charged with digging for water, her house will be engulfed if she does not keep digging. If her house is engulfed the village will be lost as well. If she stops digging the villagers come and shout at her to carry on. The villagers bring the entomologist to the hole into which he descends by rope ladder and then remove the ladder, ignoring his cries for help.
But what is it about this oddly surreal fable that makes it all the more believable, because it is set in Japan? What is it about our perceptions of Japan, and Japan's perceptions of itself that make this pared-down drama of a dual between a man and a woman seem all the more realistic than it would if were set in Europe or America?
It is a version of Robinson Crusoe, and Happy Days, but it is also a reverse of John Fowles' The Collector, in which a young man takes captive a young woman. The sexual passion which flares up between the two is a peculiar product of the imprisonment which in turn produces a child that in turn convinces the man remain in the pit with the woman, a spin on the old problem of getting stuck in a rut.

Valery Gergiev in Rehearsal (1997)

Gergiev is not only a great conductor and a good Russian citizen for putting his local orchestra back at the top of the international league, but a fascinating, inspiring and charismatic figure. In 2002, he guided three young conductors in Rotterdam through a series of masterclasses ('The Master and His Pupil'). This is one of the great documentaries about mentoring, teaching, instruction, direction and guidance, and has something about it both of the 'Karate Kid' and 50s Westerns 'Tin Star' or 'Rio Bravo', the irascible older man teasing and tormenting, disciplining and shaping young, gifted but occasionally silly talent.

Unfortunately, 'The Master and His Pupil' is still not available on disk, but there is this fascinating consolation-prize from 1997, when Gergiev led the Rotterdam orchestra through rehearsals for the Prokofiev 'Scythian Suites'.

The pairing is doubly, trebly interesting, for Gergiev himself comes from the southern states of Russia, Ossetia in the Caucasas, a district known historically as 'Scythia', and the 'bright wildness' of these ancient peoples scared invaders off, centuries ago. That spirit Prokofiev attempted to capture with his bright, jagged music in this orchestral suite which ends with the astonishing 'rising of the sun' sequence, when the sound reaches a brilliant sustained crescendo which in Gergiev's hands becomes a moment of blinding zenith and riveting drama.

Prokofiev's son, Oleg, stands by and gives some intriguing comments to the camera. Archive footage of the premiere, photos from the period, and interviews with Gergiev make this a remarkable disk in its own right. As well as a concert version of the Scythian Suites, the Rotterdam Philharmonic performs Stravinsky's Fireworks and Piano Concerto with Alexandre Toradze as soloist, Debussy's Le Martyre De Saint Sebastien.

The Tin Star (1951)

Henry Fonda is Morg Hickman, a cynical ex-sheriff turned bounty hunter who helps young, recently appointed acting Sheriff Ben Owens (Antony Perkins) with his craggy advice, his cynicism hardwon by experience, and his gun.
Immensely likeable Henry Fonda does not particularly want to help Anthony Perkins, but if he wants to get paid for his most recent bodybag-delivery as bounty-hunter, then he has to hang around in town and he might as well help the stsruggling young sheriff.
Perkins has exactly the right quality of edgy determination and haplessness to let you know he can't do his job but that he will press on regardless. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he has a struggle on his hands and the town aren't going to support him against the bad guy, in this case, Bart Bogardus (Neville Brand). Like Sheriff Chance in Rio Bravo facing off the bullying Burdette brothers who don't have respect for his authority of the law, Perkins doesn't seem to have much chance, but now he has put on the tin star he can't take it off.

Ace In The Hole (1951)

Kirk Douglas played the villain in another key noir, Out Of The Past (1947), but his baddie here is altogether more chilling and compelling. Chuck Tatum is a hard-boiled reporter down on his luck who washes up in Alberquerque riding in his brokendown car hauled by a pick-up truck like a chariot.
After insulting the editor of the local rag, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), he gets a job that he doesn't want, but having no money to pay for his car repairs, he has to stay anyway.. for two years.
By now, he's ropeable, so the editor sends him out of the office to a rattlesnake festival two hours away. En route, he stops at a tiny place called Escuando, and hears that local miner has got stuck underground, hunting for Indian pottery.
Sniffing a story, Chuck blags his way into the mineshaft and finds Leo, his leg trapped under a rockfall. But Leo Minosa (Richard Benjamin) seems more concerned that his violating Indian ghosts has brought about the collapse.
But to Chuck, this is his story, and he calls it in, creating what we now call 'a media frenzy'. Back then they called it a circus. Soon a vast carnival has assembled under the New Mexico sky. Chuck is in cahoots with the local sheriff (Ray Teal) who is seeking re-election and both decide to build the story. They persuade a reluctant Smollet, the mining engineer, (Frank Jacquet) to take the long way in to rescue the marooned Leo, and his fate is sealed. Seven days later they have a nationwide headline story, and a dead miner on their hands.
Chuck gets his comeuppance when he tries to start acting morally. His attempt to remonstrate with Leo's disenchanted wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling) end in disaster.
Billy Wilder's film is a noir under a clear sky, a thriller that becomes a satire, a satire without any laughs, and a more bitter indictment of the modern media than Citizen Kane or Network. Long neglected, the film is at last available on Criterion in a deluxe edition with a long interview with Wilder on the second disk. Halfway through the movie, I had a flashback to the last time I saw the film, in a Welsh kitchen in 1986 as a first year student, and the film seems more disturbing now than it did then, for the cynical coercive mediua stuntmen, the spin-meisters have done much worse since.

Good Fairy, The (1935)

Preston Sturges wrote this script and it is his hand which lies on this comic wish-fulfilment fantasy rather than director William Wyler's, or author of the play, Ferenc Molnar. Maureen Sullavan is Lu Ginglebusher, rescured from an 'orphan asylum' by to work as an usherette in a picture palace, but rapidly finds herself taken out of that world and placed under the wing of hotel waiter, Detlaff (Reginald Owen) who can do nothing to save her from the admiring attention of bored, ageing millionaire, Konrad, beef king of Latin America, played with chattery gusto like a youthful Wiener King (Palm Beach Story) by Frank Morgan.
'Good fairy' Maureen Sullavan tries to keep up her vow of doing one good deed a day and she sees an opportunity when the millionaire offers to make her rich, a gift she realises he would make to anyone she cares to nominate. Here is her opportunity to bring 'Christmas in July', but who to? Not the orphanage, anyway. That never seems to occur to her, and at a loss she turns to the phone-book and selects the 'poor-looking' name of lawyer, Dr Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall). He is soon the recipient of 120,000 a yaer (kroner). But has she done the right thing?

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce (1975)

Chantal Akerman's three-hour study of three days in the life of a Belgian housewife - or is she a wife? There is no sign of a Mr Dielman, though Jeanne Dielman has a son, the vaguely moronic grown up boy whose sofa-bed she makes and puts away each morning. That is one of the rituals, customs, habits that she must repeat every day. Cleaning, cooking, bathing herself, shopping, taking lunch in a cafe, banking her income, and of course earning her income, which she does by entertaining gentlemen in the afternoons.
That we could then call her 'a prostitute' is perhaps made more complicated by the aesthetic decision taken by the film-maker to give equal weighting to the other activities in her day. By contrast, in other filmed portraits of 'women on the game' (Vivre Sa Vie, Belle De Jour, Working Girls) the women's other routines are glossed over and the performance of their duties is given most film-time, making the description of them as 'working girls', and nothing else, seem appropriate. Catherine Deneuve is a housewife who, bored of her eventless life, goes on the game; she then becomes a prostitute. Jeanne Dielman may not even be a housewife; she is a mother who cleans house, prepares food, washes herself, goes shopping, and earns income by welcoming men into her bedroom during one hour of the afternoon. What does this make her? It makes her 'Jeanne Dielman, 23Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'. Quite simply, she is her address.
We see three of her clients, a white-haired old man, a youth, and a middle-aged Belgiques with a handlebar moustache. He is the unluckiest of the three, but we don't find that out until the 183rd minute of this careful, methodical study. this sequence of 'perpendicular' shots. Like the Dardennes brothers whose documentaries maintain an almost painfully steady eye on their subjects, Chantal Akerman likes to look from a certain distance, for long periods of time with an almost childlike unblinkingness. That quality may not be peculiarly Belgian, but for a small country an awful lot of people seem to get killed here, if all of the victims of the Poirot and Maigret novels are included. In this tiny notoriously neutral nation trapped between larger neighbours it has been their history to sit back and watch.
Chantal Akerman creates feminist films whose political concept matches their aesthetic form. On the same disk set, her films Rendez-vous of Anna, Je Tu Il Elle, Hotel Monterey, News From Home, and a documentary on Chantal Akerman, together with interviews with those who know her. and two early short films.