Beautiful but disaffecting is probably the best way to describe a film like The Illusionist. It is very pretty to look at and can be quite funny in places but it feels a bit hollow. The back story that I was unaware of lends it slightly more depth, but I will be honest in my philistinism here: my limited exposure to Jacques Tati has not left me enamoured of him.

In 1959, A magician travels from job to job until he meets a young girl in Scotland, who then joins him. The magic business doesn't run so well, but the girl is convinced magic is real … so the magician picks up odd jobs here and there in Edinburgh to keep the girl in material possessions.

True to Tati's form, The Illusionist has almost no dialogue. The character of the magician is modeled after Tati himself, and the girl is apparently supposed to be based on a daughter that he allegedly abandoned.
What follows, based on what we can piece together from the largely emotive animation and gibberish speak, is a literal object lesson: nothing comes from nothing, all people in entertainment are suicidally depressed (and this is apparently funny), and young Scottish girls fail to understand the way the material world operates.

It would be a disservice to silent films to say that the lack of dialogue means we can never really know these characters: it is the disjointed nature and repetition of the film that means that we don't really know that much about them or care much for them. They are simple caricatures who don't really have many emotions beyond a baseline affection for one another.

While it's engaging to look at, there's something ever so slightly off about the film. One of the aspects of this offness is that in many places it's simply annoying: the depressive clown, the ventriloquist, the effeminate mincing "Britoons”, aren't so much a joy to watch as they are a protracted distraction to endure.

While Sylvain Chomet was awarded for his Triplets of Belleville, this is a simple case where nostalgia for a much-loved filmmaker triumphs over "proper” cinematic sensibility.

I fully expect to be contradicted by the professional critical establishment when The Illusionist reaches wider attention. I enjoyed it "enough”, but I didn't think there was much more to it than the fluidity of its mostly excellent animation.

Postscript: On the advice of commenter Matt I append some more context for the film: Roger Ebert has publicised two sides of the argument. First is “The secret of Jacques Tati“, the second is “In defense of The Illusionist“. The key quote in the defence is the following:

“The Illusionist” is a work of the imagination that seeks only to stand or fall as a film in its own right.

Personally, I think it falls. And that is all that really matters to me: it’s a movie that doesn’t quite work.

Xavier Dolan. 19 years old when he wrote and directed I Killed My Mother! Instiller of fear and jealousy into the hearts of men and women alike!

Dolan is a boy of honesty, a boy of spite. A boy who loves pieces to camera, but only if he’s allowed to do them naked and black and white in his bathroom.

I Killed My Mother is a pretty good movie, but it’s rough around the edges and its protagonist is misplaced. There’s one great character here, but her whiney idiot foil has been mistakenly made the lead in her place.

Heartbeats was my first film of the 2010 Sydney Film Festival. If this is how it starts, I'm expecting good things. It's also a competition film. I only saw one of those last year: Louis-Michel (hardly a competitor). This year, I'm seeing every competition entry.

Heartbeats is not for everyone, dividing along two primary gaps: sexuality (preferred by gays) and age (preferred by hip twenty somethings). That said, Roger Ebert himself is keen to see it, and I can't say I blame him. Much is made of the fact that director Xavier Dolan is only 21, but everyone gets their start sometime.

Animal Kingdom is out in Australian cinemas today.

Australia. It’s a tough country to nail down, because so many of us hate the image that we project. It’s called the “cultural cringe”. No one in Australia goes to see Australian films; if you talk about a movie and then say that it’s Australian, your audience quickly loses interest.

There is something utterly uncompelling about the promotion of our films that a lot of people don’t get through the door to find out if something is worth watching. Of course, it was not always like this. And it doesn’t always have to be like this.

Animal Kingdom is a magnetic movie. From its first trailer, featuring a home invasion set to Air Supply’s “All Out of Love”, I knew that I had to see it. A more conventional trailer only cemented that thought. The fact that it won at Sundance didn't hurt, either.

Suddenly Animal Kingdom had done what Beneath Hill 60 with its appeal to jingoism and I Love You, Too, with its appeal to the Peter Dinklage fanbase, had resolutely failed to do: it got me excited to see an Australian movie.

In an industry where apathy is the killer, where it’s easier to go to Transformers than it is to make an informed decision, where they let Robin Hood open Cannes, to set off someone’s radar means something.

Through no fault of Animal Kingdom, I had come to expect it as some sort of Holy Grail of Australian cinema. It’s pretty good, but it’s not close to sacramental.

Warning: Contains minor Mass Effect spoilers, no Mass Effect 2 spoilers.

You may have read that the Mass Effect movie has been reoptioned. This apparently is news, because I thought that around the time Mass Effect 2 came out there was talk of the movie. No matter.

Thing is, look at the Mass Effect boxes. Look at the guy with the shaved head, the guy with the gun, the guy who doesn’t care what you think of him. Who is that guy?

Some might argue that he is John Shepard. There is no John Shepard. Mass Effect is an infinite series of parallel Shepards, from LL Shepard, the genocide preventing beacon of light, to the bloodthirsty Sarah “Going Rogue” Shepard, hell bent on homicide and pitifully thin profit margins. There are gradations of Shepard, and each is particular to the player. Sarah Shepard may be physically identical to LL Shepard, but she has black lips to match her black heart.

One gets so attached to one’s first Shepard that any other Shepard seems somewhat wrong by comparison. When Sarah Shepard embarked upon her maiden voyage, I reflected upon the fact that LL would never be so pointlessly antagonistic to the entire galaxy. It jarred.

Then, as I got under Sarah’s skin, I realised that she was indeed her own person, and not simply LL with some dark make up on and a smart mouth: she was a genuinely anarchic space bitch and she didn’t care who knew it.

I don’t have stats on this but it seems that quite a lot of people play Shepard as a woman. The default Shepard – shaved marine John Shepard – seems too boring to even fathom. One of your options in these games is to play as a variant of a space wizard. You can also be a space hacker, a psychic computer genius super bug-empath, or quite a few combinations of all of the above … yet so many players choose to run through the universe as a dude with a gun.

I don’t have anything against “dudes with guns”, but it is hard to deny that in the current field they are a little overrepresented. If I want to play as a woman who can suck you into a vortex of pain with a gesture of her hand, then I will.

So what will we end up with in a projected movie of Mass Effect? We will end up with someone else's Shepard: a Shepard set in stone, a Shepard that we, the audience, have no say in. To canonize Mass Effect is to weaken its brand.

Remember the uproar that went up when it was discovered that a Shepard created from scratch in Mass Effect 2 had wantonly murdered Wrex and doomed the Council to extinction? That Shepard was a jerk by default. That's not anybody's Shepard. That is Bioware's idea of what a lot of peoples' Shepards might have been.

It is because of this that the PC crowd had the huge Shepard Supermarket, wherein players could download the Shepard that most closely conformed to their ideal Shepard. Fortunately, Mass Effect 2's story allowed for extensive plastic surgery at the beginning of the game to reshape a Shepard into the Shepard of one's own dreams. It's a degree of decadence just short of Tyrell Corporation, but it restores not just peace of mind to the player but to the universe they have been charged with the protection of.

What makes Shepard so great is that she is a legitimate character rather than the blank slate everyman that so many modern video games offer. The player is given a pre-formed character with whom they quickly familiarize themselves, and based on what they know about her they decide what action she is most likely to take.

Would Sarah Shepard show mercy and allow the Rachni to survive? No, she would give their queen an acid bath and laugh at the unheard screams of millions of children never to be born.

Would LL Shepard slaughter the citizens of Feros simply because it's easier than trying to deprogram them? No, she would ensure that no one died on her watch … and she would do it efficiently and without complaint. That's just the kind of Shepard LL is.

That every Shepard belongs to the player means that there is no single Mass Effect canon. Different Shepards created different universes, and to watch a movie that asserts that something you know in your heart is blatantly wrong is to bring pain upon oneself.  The movie removes power and agency from the hands of those most dedicated to the subject matter: the players.

Commander Shepard belongs to everybody. There is no single Commander Shepard. For some charlatan to foist the Commander Shepard of their own creation upon the world, and to claim him (and it will be him) as the Commander Shepard, to expect us to adopt him as our unquestioned messiah, is an act of intense hubris, and one that we must not stand for.

Whatever the Mass Effect movie turns out to be … and we don't strictly need it, because the games are already there to be played, enjoyed and consumed in an almost cinematic fashion … it won't be Mass Effect. It might have some cool ideas, it might have some cool characters, action, worlds and an epic story befitting the grandest of space operas, but it will ultimately be someone else's vision.

Mass Effect is at its heart an expression of democracy: the player's destination is universal, but their choices along the way act to create an individual Shepard … a Shepard they can call their own.

Credit is due to Bioware forums user OraVelnoria87 for their “FemShep” montage.

It has been written into Australian law that I have to love Kylie Minogue. I have absolutely no say in the matter. There is no point in fighting what is my ultimate destiny: to lay down my life in duty to Kylie. After the mixed response to X (“The worst thing she’s ever done”/”The best thing she’s done since Light Years“/”Body Language kind of sucked, didn’t it?”), Kylie returns on July 5 with Aphrodite. Today she released the video for the lead single, “All The Lovers”:

I don’t really know what I think of the song or the video. People who know more about me think that “All The Lovers” could become an anthemic dance floor hit, but I’m not sure about that. I spend so little time on dance floors that my opinion is largely irrelevant on that count. The song sounds pretty middle of the range. I’ve listened to it a few times now, and I know some people were instantly blown away. I know that when the album comes out I will probably listen to it endlessly and pick the choicest songs for my “Mostly Awesome” playlist, before it becomes the occasional curio.

As to the video itself: well, it’s a pansexual orgy or something. Everyone removes their clothes, forms a pyramid, puts Kylie on top. There’s a giant inflatable elephant, and a horse galloping through streets frozen in time. If only it were a unicorn. If only I could see what Kylie has seen with my eyes.

The Concert is a movie that I have several issues with, but it’s also a certain kind of movie: one that works to such an explosive finale that practically all is forgiven.

That one has condescended to forgive the movie, however, does not mean that it its flaws can or should be overlooked.

Andrei Fillipov (Aleksei Guskov) used to be the Maestro, the finest conductor in the Bolshoi. Alas, he was named an enemy of the people and demoted to janitor. Thirty years later, he hijacks his boss’ fax machine and accepts an invitation to perform at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Naturally, he has to get the orchestra back together … And to enlist the violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet (Inglourious Basterds' Mélanie Laurent) to perform the all-important solo in his Tchaikovsky recital.

The trailer for The Concert didn’t quite strike the right note, trying too clumsily to balance the comedy and the drama of the film. I was still interested in seeing it, and I was rewarded to a degree.