This documentary records Al Gore's global crusade against global warming. Clearly made for a Middle-America audience the film chronicles one of Al Gores lectures on the weighty subject that the world faces in relation to greenhouse gases. At the outset I wish to stress that this is clearly a subject worthy of discussion and I am in agreement with much of what Al Gore is arguing. However, while I liked the film a lot, I am not so sure that the style of film will work well with Australian or for that matter-non-US audiences in general. Al Gore has a clear way of speaking, but he is no David Suzuki.

So where does this film go wrong? Al Gore speaks well, and this is to be expected of someone who was Vice President, but he does not have the charisma of the man who was one level above him - Bill Clinton. (I won't comment here about the man he lost the Presidential race to, George W. Bush, suffice to say that the film shows great restraint in its depiction of Al Gores loss in Florida.) Furthermore, while he seems to have the credentials to work the lecture circuit, he looses creditability in that he is someone from a wealthy family and privileged background. This personality issue leads to a problem with the structure of the film. Is this an Al Gore family portrait or a film designed to engage an audience to change their habits and rally to change the world. The film spends too much time talking about Al's idyllic childhood on the family farm, an incident in which his then six-year-old son was run over, and the death of his sister to cigarette related cancer. The film makes tenuous links of these family events with his awakening of the global problem, but if they needed to be included here at all, they are far to long and sentimental.

Other problems; too many graphs and perhaps not enough depth. There were times when I felt like I was watching a 1950s school documentary in primary school. The animations were primary school level too. Putting a real frog in hot water is obviously a cruel thing to do, but for an adult audience the animation was reminiscent of a pre-school TV show. Some of the facts Al presented were slightly questionable as well. Australia is in the grip of a ten-year drought and yet the graphic he presented of the effect of global warming on our rainfall was a net increase. A graphic of emissions suggested that Australia has a low greenhouse gas emission. However, because of our heavy reliance on coal - and brown coal for that matter, we are the second highest polluters per head of population in the world- behind the only other major country not to sign the Kyoto agreement, the United States.

It is clear that the audience for this film is Middle-America. It is safe, it clean, it is wholesome. It has much to offer an audience that is yet to be converted or convinced of the very real problem we are facing as a world. Its presentation and technical qualities as a documentary are first rate. It presents its facts clearly and fairly honestly, without the hysteria of Mike Moore. And perhaps that is An Inconvenient Truth's biggest problem - it is bland. (The people I saw it with felt it was too long - but I was certainly engaged for its hour and 45 minutes.)

I already use Green Energy, the vast majority of my lights are mini-fluro's, I recycle as much as possible, eat organic food when available, have a highly water efficient front loading washing machine, and use public transport if it a viable option for my trip. So is it people like me who are going to see this film, or is it going to engage an audience that needs to be converted? Unfortunately I suspect that it will be the former.

Recomended for those needing a push in the right direction.

3.5 stars (out of 5)

The story is told by Walt, (Jesse Eisenberg) and is a semi-auto biographical account of the directors own teenage years. Walt brutally rejects his mother Joan (Laura Linney - Tales of the City, Love Actually, and the forthcoming Australian film Jindabyne) and more or less sides with his father Bernard (Jeff Daniels - Terms of Endearment, Pleasantville) a university academic who is finding his highly intellectual writing is increasingly difficult to get published. Joan's affairs have been discovered and her first novel has been accepted for publication which further inflames Bernard's anger - marvelously portrayed on the tennis court and while playing table tennis with his younger son Frank (Owen Klein)whose emotional problems are displayed by smearing his semen about the school and getting drunk when he is forgotten when his parents go on separate trips away. Walt must not only negotiate his way through the acrimony of his parents' divorce but also his own discovery of sex and relationships. Bernard's failure is manifested in the run down house he moves into, his appalling cooking, and the unsuccessful relationship he has with one of his students, but he has his sons on side, it is Walt's slow realisation that his father is a first-class asshole that grants Walt his epiphany.

Although I am not a fan of hand held camera work, Baumbach and his cinematographer (Robert Yeoman - Drugstore Cowboy and Rushmore) use the style well, involving the audience in the claustrophobia of the disintegration of the relationship. There is a brief but stunning montage of images New York subway stations, and the interiors are subtly lit to reveal the stark contrast betwwen the two houses. Editing is superbly carried out by Tim Streeto.

Strangely this is the second film I have seen this year that involves tennis (Match Point) and even more strangely this film reminded me a little of Woody Allen's Annie Hall in which Allen meets Annie (Diane Keeton) while playing tennis.

This is a remarkable, realistic, film that brings you into the lives of characters who's lives have disintegrated, but are slowly finding their way to resolution. For me the film has just the right amount of humour and ends at just the right moment.

4 1/2

Match Point is not Allen's best film ever, it is not a return to his best mid 1970s films such as Manhattan and Annie Hall, yet it is certainly his best film since 'Husbands and Wives' and 'Shadows and Fog' from 1992. Unusually for Allen too is that the film is not only not set in New York, but in London - perhaps something to do with BBC funding?

In Match Point Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a high ranking professional tennis player who, bored with being not quite good enough on the circuit, takes up a position as a coach in a tennis club that attracts the well to do. He soon meets Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) who introduces him to his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Chris is drawn into the very well to do family and is more or less pressured in to a top job in the family business and marrying Chloe. Chris also meets Tom's beautiful, but slightly unstable fiancé Nola (Scarlet Johansson) and the inevitable affair develops. A fatal attraction develops and Chris must make the choice between his very comfortable existence with the Hewitt's and his sexual passion for Nola.

Match Point is a drama about ambition and obsession, the seduction of wealth, and the often-jarring relationship between love and lust. Perhaps most importantly, however, the story reveals the huge part luck plays in the events of our lives, refuting the comforting misconception that more of our life is under our control than it really is.

The subject matter is not a new area for Allen, who does not appear in the film, and Match Point is more or less a straight drama sprinkled with Allen's trademark irony. As always Allen get fabulous performances from his actors. Perhaps the only discordant mark against the film was the casting of James Nesbitt (Cold Feet) as a policeman, it is hard to take him seriously following his comedic roles (such as the scene in Cold Feet where he woo's Rachel (Helen Baxendale) by standing naked outside her house with a rose held between his lower cheeks) and the constant smirk on his face.

Overall, Match Point is an excellent film that maintains Allen's ironic view of modern upper class city society and returns him to the forefront of filmmaking.

4.5 stars

It is thirty years since I first saw this film staring Jack Nicholson in the role of a journalist who uses the death of a fellow hotel guest to change his identity and tries to escape his frustrated life, and I had more or less forgotten about it. However, with its huge reputation and the Astor playing it for two weeks in a restored version (It doesn’t look like they found the original negative, but worked from an OK print.) it was a good opportunity to compare The Passenger with more recent films about journalistic ethics such as Capote and Good Night and Good Luck.

Well how has stood the test of time? Firstly, this film is achingly slow. In the 70 year-old Astor the sound of the audience travels through the dress circle far more so than in a modern cinema, and the fidgetiness of the audience was clear. Leonard Maltin’s guide puts the film at 119 minutes and the new print comes in at 126 minutes. The first ten minutes of Nicholson’s character David Locke – a play on the films premise that we are locked into to our lives and it is impossible to escape our given identity – traveling through desert to unsuccessfully meet a band of rebels in an undisclosed northern African military state, seems to go on for ever and it is only when Locke’s temper explodes after bogging his Land Rover that the story really begins. Locke trades his identity for that of a gunrunner – Robertson (Charles Mulvehill). At this point we see Locke using Robertson’s to further his career as an investigative journalist - or do we? We are taken on a road trip through London, Germany, and Spain (lovely use of the Gaudi rooftops of Bacelona), with Locke befriending a young architecture student (whose name is never given.) played by a sultry Maria Schneider (Last Tango In Paris) - who more or less disappears after this film. Robinson is of course wanted by the authorities and together with his former wife (Jenny Runacre) and film editor (Ian Hendry) who eventually realise Locke has taken on Robinson’s identity follow him and “The Girl”. They all finally catch up with him in a dusty little town.

The film is best summed up by its final shot. Beginning with a very very slow zoom through the bars of the hotel room onto the dusty square where a series of small yet familiar events happen, but also the arrival of the African gun buyers. The shot then passes through the bars and follows the arrival of Locke’s former wife and the police. We then return to the window where Lock lays on his bed in the same position he found Robinson.

The film is brilliant in the way it depicts Locke as a man without direction, but its filmic style is purely early seventies, and as such very dated. Its early hand held camera work is very grainy and on the huge Astor screen difficult to watch. No doubt there were location difficulties, but it demonstrates just how far colour film stock has progressed. Although I disagree with the assertion that other people’s identities are never better than our own and that the world is a stark alien place, this is one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s more cohesive films – others include Blowup (1966) and Zabriske Point (1970). However, this might have made a better film if Locke had used his new identity to further his making of the film about the damaging struggle of the military against the people of Africa at the time of Idi Amin and apartheid. Overall, a very interesting film, but one that threw away many opportunities.

8 stars.

Kinky Boots has had a lot of promotion over the past three weeks that is something that always sets off alarm bells. However, while it is not Good Bye and Good Luck or Capote, Kinky Boots is fairly good escapist entertainment.

Kinky Boots is something of a mixture of the excellent little Australian film Spotswood and its well-known cousin Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Like Spotswood it is set in a small shoe-making factory that time forgot. The old owner is living in a previous age, but keeping the factory going for the sake of the livelihood of his employees. When he dies (Kinky Boots) or is forced to look at his finances (Spotswood) a new direction is required. Both films rely on the quirkiness of the employees, but where Spotswood has Anthony Perkins as a hard nosed accountant who is softened by the ways of the factory, Kinky Boots has Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton, Will - Secret Life of Us) going through a similar scenario as that of the less than likable son of Monarch of the Glen (BBC TV) - called back to run a failing business, leaves high pressure fiancée for a girl from the other side of the tracks, Lauren - beautifully played by Sarah-Jane Potts. Edgerton plays the character in a rather surly manner that makes the character quite unlikable. (Not that his character in Secret Life of Us was that pleasant either.) and the final scene where he is forced onto the runway at a Milan shoe fair, are cringe worthy.

Although promoted as a Joel Edgerton film, this is a really a vehicle for Chiwetel Ejiofor as Lola, a Transvestite who Charlie "saves" from thugs. Lola is a dreamer, but has a successful career as a performer in a small, off Soho, night club and Charlie is made to see the potential of moving from well made, but poor selling, men’s shoes into specialist shoes for heavy men who easily break the heals of stiletto shoes made for women. There is the usual conflict between the Lola and Charlie and a factory worker - who gives his respect when Lola gives away winning an arm wrestling contest.

It is really Chiwetel's performance and his singing in particular that are the stand out in this film. It is not camp in the way the Pricilla is and it avoids the miming of disco songs used in so many films since Muriel’s Wedding. Chiwetel, if he indeed does do the singing, sings magnificently and I would recommend the soundtrack.

This is not an altogether bad film, it is a just a little bland and flat in its direction and performances - Chiwetel excepted. As you can see it seemed to draw in so many other films for its story and was therefore for me not terribly original. This is not Four Wedding and a Funeral, but likable, feel-good film, that will make a great winters evening video night in.

6 stars.

There is little doubt that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Capote is just about perfect. However, it is perhaps the ‘cold’ in the title Truman Capote's book that sums up the nature of this intense film directed by Bennett Miler that sums up the Capote for me. From the cold snow coloured location of the prison, the cold cells both in the prison and the house of the police officer, to the seeming cold blooded way in witch Capote himself bonds with the killer firstly awaiting trial then death, the films’ settings, photography, and overall muted colour pallet left me somewhat cold and drained.

The book In Cold Blood made Truman Capote a celebrity writer and also killed his writing career. Prior to his long and painful encounter with the murders of a family of farmers in a small community, Capote wrote for the New Yorker and for Hollywood, his most famous film adaptation being Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In his modest, but well-appointed apartment, Capote contemplates the daily news and comes across the story of the murders and immediately decides that this will be his next assignment. He co-opts his long time friend Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird) as his assistant and the pair infiltrate not only the community, but with a little inducement, the gaol where the killers are held.

The manipulation by Capote of the police, and the prisoners is perhaps the crux of the story, but it is difficult to assess whether Capote’s relationship with part Indian Perry Smith (Clinton Collins jnr), killer of the family, is Capote’s quest for material or something more, perhaps even voyeristic. It is this ambiguity that makes the film so powerful, for while Capote is clearly gay and the work he is undertaking places tension on his relationship with his partner Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood) Capote draws in and then withdraws from Perry Smith when he needs to.

Although this is a brilliant film and the performances are excellent, there was something about this film that left me drained, uncomfortable, and slightly repelled. It didn’t draw me in quite as much as Good Night and Good Luck – an equally claustrophobic film - despite being of an equal standard. Where Good Night and Good Luck is told from a fly on the wall perspective, Capote seems much more conventional in its production and story elements. Yet it is perhaps the coldness of the whole scenario, Capote’s cold heartedness, and the lack of relief that lowered the overall pleasure of the film for me. I certainly didn’t feel that the depiction of the murders was necessary and more could have been done with Harper Lee to create a respite.

What makes this film a cut above (and one that I will by on DVD) is the performance by Hoffman which is simply brilliant.

9 stars

To put it nicely the school at Portland and I didn't quite go together. The students as individuals were great, as most young people are, but the lack of authority in the school was a painful issue. The students simply did not have the respect for anyone other than their peers. Disipline issues were simply not followed through...

Moving back to Melbourne brings mixed feelings. After three weeks at the new school I already have more respect than the two years in Portland, there is a relaxed feeling amongst staff, and things are follwed up fast! Ask for a fan. Within two days the electrictians have instaled ceiling fans. Ask for a new keyboard. Requested as Non Urgent, and replaced unquestion in hours.

As to where I'm living, traffic noise, a cheap stereo, and a child with a VERY high pitched screech and must crying have replaced the relaxing sound of wind and waves. And upstairs is to hot to sleep on the many summer days above 30C. It seems you can't have everything. But it is only 10 minutes drive to work and a about 3 min walk to the station.

McCarthy's hearings are infamous for the way he accused everyone with even the remotest association with Communism with being an actual Communist activist. The parallels with Bush's America in the 2000s are pointed and fifty years after McCarthy we have not a war on Communism but a war on Islam. Clooney's timing of the film certainly hints at this association and takes the issue far more seriously than Woody Allen's 1976 poke at McCarthy in The Front.

The production takes a fly on the wall perspective and at times can be quite claustrophobic as it follows the crew through their research and presentation. There is absolutely no acknowledgement of the audience, except when Murrow talks to his television audience and his coolly detached mannerisms reinforce Clooney's chosen style. Social Values of the time are clearly depicted in the almost every characters smoking habits (cleverly satirised by showing a commercial with a 'doctor' recommending cigarettes) and the illicit relationship between a male and female couple who are crew members and told to choose who shall leave when things get tough and the show is scaled back. The Jazz singing interludes provide a perfect relief to the building tension.

Overall, performances are impeccable, and apart from a couple of very minor continuity glitches, so is the production itself.

10 stars.

Strange weather for this time of the year with warm days and either warm or cold nights.

MZ's computer died again so heading for Melbourne this weekend. Why does it cost Aus $264 one way on the plane and $55 on the train. The plane fare would get me to Perth and back from Melbourne instead of a 1 hour bumpy flight on the type of plane that crashed in northern Qld on the weekend. Meeting students and other teachers on Sunday for Japan festival so will catch the train.

Attacked more of the coastal wattle on the weekend. Nasty stuff has runners 20 or more feet long.

Just litening to the Budget. Honest John has given very generous tax cuts if you earn more than double average weekly earnings and virtually nothing (sandwitch and milkshake per week)for those on average earnings (me).