Film Carew

13 September 2012 | 11:39 am | Anthony Carew

Given the continual crossover from Sundance Darling to Plucky Oscar Contender, it's no surprise there's an Oscar-bait quality to the pics that triumph in the movie-biz-orgy-that-Bobby-Redford-built; the grand gong usually going to a dubious picture straining for forced profundity way beyond its station.

For all the deserved shit we hang on hilarious Oscar winners —seriously, the idea that even one person, one time, anywhere, ever, thought that Paul Haggis' bowel-gougingly awful race-trolling ensemble movie Crash was the best film of the year blows my mind, let alone an entire institution deciding it— not nearly enough scorn is piled on its younger sibling: the Sundance Grand Jury Prizewinner. Given the continual crossover from Sundance Darling to Plucky Oscar Contender, it's no surprise there's an Oscar-bait quality to the pics that triumph in the movie-biz-orgy-that-Bobby-Redford-built; the grand gong usually going to a dubious picture straining for forced profundity way beyond its station. A survey of recent winners reveals a painful litany of cinematic losers: 2009's brain-breakingly shit friedchickensploitation trainwreck, Precious: Based On The Novel "Push" By Sapphire, which is somehow worse than its title; 2010's dopey, dressed-down shrine to trailer-trash vengeance and big box fashions, Winter's Bone, which really needed the Academy to establish a Best Polar Fleece award on its behalf; and 2011's Like Crazy, a quickly-grating study of long-distnace, long-timeframe romance seemingly feted solely for being shot on a consumer-grade still camera.

Now, joining these hallowed ranks is Beasts Of The Southern WIld, 2012's American indie critical darling which arrives on local screens floating on an ever-rising tide of critical hosannas, hysterical hype, and shortening Oscar odds. Yet the flood of good-favour has washed away its threads, and, once more, the Emperor arrives here plainly unclothed; this Magical Cinematic Masterwork That Will Leave Audiences Cheering being, for one, fairly poorly made. First-time filmmaker Benh Zeitlin fancied himself in tune with old-school celluloid mysticism, not only shooting on film —and thereby not having the instant playback of digital— but refusing to even look at the dailies. If you want to call this daydreaming, not delusion, that's fine; but, given Zeitlin was a debutante coming of age in a digital era, he actually wasn't functioning with the master-shot formalism of old craftsmen, his Miss Smilla Sense of the film-in-his-mind really was just a new-agey take on that new-millennial mode of constant compromise: we'll stitch it together in editing. Thus, his film —hailed, somehow, as a work of visionary visuals— rolls out with the same visual incoherence that has become the Hollywood house style; there more spatially-confused sequences, unnecessary edits, and jarring moments of montage, here, than in some superhero-ish explosion movie.

This compositional chaos betrays a film that, narratively, is founded in a fascinating notion: a portray of environmental decay and planetary chaos as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old; reality and fantasy blurring in the surreal landscape of post-Hurricane, flood-ravaged Louisiana. Films about childhood flights-of-fantasy are an uneven bunch, at best, and so Beasts Of The Southern Wild goes; definitely getting more problematic in those moments in which it feels as if it's condescending to its six-year-old heroine, or plumping her for darnedest-things-saying cuteness. Made with a host of non-professional actors in a rural community whose land is slipping into the ocean, the film has a zeal for realism that stands at odds with the imposition of fairy-tale, but there were enough moments of junkyard landscape and unwashed kids to bring back memories of David Gordon Green's actually-astonishing 2000 debut, George Washington. Green has since gone onto a shameful career in Hollywood, and, with Beasts Of The Southern Wild barreling towards awards-show-season success, I'm sure Zeitlin has his own sell-out on the horizon. If this is as good as his independent artistry gets, well, it won't be for much; the filmmaker using a scattershot style —he has a seeming disinterest in composition— to strain for a celebratory, life-in-the-face-of-death ecstasy that suggests Zeitlin's been to a Flaming Lips concert; both the music and the picture dressed in indie threads yet harbouring the over-the-top ambitions of any other button-pushing Oscar contender.

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

Warriors Of The Rainbow: Seediq Bale is the most expensive production in Taiwanese film history, which some may take as a promise of epic spectacle and cinematic grandeur, but to me serves as instant warning of undoubted mediocrity. When there's so much money on the table, everyone with a stake in the flick is bound to have an opinion, and a by-committee approach to artistic decisions will surely hold the finished picture hostage. And, sure enough, this interminable epic is absent of any moments of artistic daring; instead a familiar host of war-movie clichés at play in a picture that feels like the Taiwanese answer to, like, an Ed Zwick movie.  Its entirety, which I suffered through, is 276 tedious minutes, though I believe a scant 150-minute cut is what's actually on local release. It tells the historical-ish tale of a group of indigenous warriors staging a bloodied uprising against imperial Japanese occupationists, and, as much as its hijacking of history is meaningful in its homeland, here the film plays as a familiar set of noble-savage clichés that has little to recommend it.

Make Hummus Not War is like a minor night in front of SBS transplanted, a little unflatteringly, to cinema screens. Trevor Graham's affable, quirkly, memoirist, documentarian-in-front-of-the-camera picture is a dawdling-through-the-Middle-East lark that 'explores' the hummus wars —in which Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese argue over who invented the chickpea dip, and thus who has ownership of it as cultural tradition— with an everyman friendliness. It's plenty crowdpleasing and entertaining, but, as cinema, it's a great piece of television.