Author: Alex Doenau

In the perfect world, Alice in Wonderland could be released without having to be considered by people above a certain age as "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland”. If the exact same movie had been made by someone with no name to speak of, the viewers would be more free to loudly proclaim that the movie kind of sucks.

I'm free to do that now, of course: this movie kind of sucks.

There's a stigma to having done so, though. Had I loved it, I would have been a Tim Burton sympathiser in a dense jungle of haters. Had I hated it, which is almost my position, I would have been a petty fool who can't understand true greatness.

So ignore Tim Burton, and take Alice in Wonderland on its own merits: fact is, it doesn't have many. It's simply not a good or interesting movie, and no name can mask that fact.

Critical darling Up in the Air is a movie that could stand to get me into a lot of trouble. This is largely because I don't understand why it was the favourite of so many critics in the last year; it is a well-made movie, and a good one, but to me it had none of the emotional resonance that I expect from something like this.

Miyazaki Hayao is one of the stalwarts of Japanese animation, and possibly the only director known by filmic people in the Western world. After a thirty year career of increasingly telling humanity how terrible and polluting they are, Miyazaki finally returns to the spirit of wonder evident in the heroines of My Neighbour Totoro. In Ponyo he has made a movie about the relationship between a five year old boy and a magical fish girl. In his old age, the man has truly become the freewheeling Miyazaki.

It's ironic that Rowan and I didn't pay for The Girlfriend Experience. We made our way to the cinema through the worst kind of storm (the sort that lasts only as long as it takes you to get from point A to B) to see Ponyo, only to find that it had been cancelled due to an accidental double booking for a festival called "Queerdoc”, which I'm assuming was tonight featuring a documentary about lesbians.

They said that they were sorry, but that they could comp us tickets to anything else that night. Not willing to wait around two and a half hours to see the late Ponyo, we decided to see The Girlfriend Experience instead. Then, during dinner, I realised that this was still a Soderbergh movie, and that it would finish in time for the late showing of Ponyo. We bought tickets for Ponyo before we went into The Girlfriend Experience, and I'll be honest: I spent a great deal of The Girlfriend Experience looking forward to seeing Ponyo.

Rowan said, at the end of the screening, that "it's the first movie I've seen in a long time that I didn't like at least a part of”. I'm not that extreme, but really: The Girlfriend Experience is like a more airheaded, shallow version of Gawker. The sad fact is that the movie seems to reflect a certain reality: people like this exist, and they're just as horrible as they appear on the screen.

Pixar is one of the greatest film studios presently in operation. They are a studio with a consistent vision and a strong distaste for making the same film twice. Above all, they don't just make great animation, they almost always make great films. Pixar is a studio captained by people with a deep respect for every aspect of their craft, and they have impressed once again with Up, which finally sees release in Australia this month.

I had to see Inglourious Basterds twice to properly appreciate it. The first time was one beset with hang ups: expectations of a film, expectations of history; I came away from it thinking that it had great moments but was uncertain as to its quality as a whole movie. It turned out that the film has great moments, yes, sequences of incandescence that outshine its remainder; thing is, the remainder is still almost as great. It’s now safe for me to say that Inglourious Basterds is an unqualified success: a blissful piece of film making and a great film on top of that. If it took me a week to realise that, it’s my own fault.

Public Enemies is not, as I was informed the day that I saw it, "the worst movie ever”. It's not a particularly good movie, but it's not a bad movie. The most accurate word for Public Enemies is "flat”. In a few more words, I would go on to describe the cinematography as "extreme close up HD shaky cam”. One of the best things that Spielberg, for example, does in his treatment of period film is to make them feel as if they were made in the time they're set; Munich, despite whatever else you might say about it, felt like a seventies film.

While there are obvious aesthetic and practical considerations to take into account in the making of a period piece set in the twenties (Clint Eastwood did a pretty good job in Changeling), Michael Mann's choice to shoot Public Enemies in HD and with such proximity to the actors divorces the film from the audience. Alienating the audience with cinematography is not a good idea when you've chosen to tell an interesting story in an unengaging fashion, eking flat characterisation out of normally talented actors.

Public Enemies had the chance to have it all: bank robberies! Johnny Depp! Style! Panache! It's not dull and it's not a bad movie, but it simply doesn't work. It's a movie that asks its audience to sit there and watch for two and a half hours. Their eyes won't slide off the screen, but will they give a damn about what they're seeing? It would be a tough gambit for the studios, but this is a movie where the poster is better than the finished product; good promotion and a good cast will carry it so far, but how will it fare on word of mouth here in Australia?