Netflix Australia
Film: The Jungle Book (2016, US), directed by Jon Favreau – out 17 January
A rare wonderful big-budget Hollywood film, The Jungle Book is full of life, lucid in expression and rich with ideas about the ecological world and our place within it. If there’s one thing Hollywood is still good at, it’s striking a balance between making films for children that also resonate with adults: films which walk that fine line between simple and non-simplistic.
This remake of the 1967 animated classic recasts the original’s themes through an environmental lens, crafting an optimistic conservationist classic for the contemporary era. Intricately imagined with the perfect blend of live-action and CGI, Mowgli’s new jungle world is a place of danger and awe – and a cinematic haven for children and adults. Great school holiday viewing.
Film: Strangerland (2015, Australia) directed by Kim Farrant – out 15 January
For me, this small, unusual film was one of the Australian standouts of 2015. On the surface, Strangerland is a missing-child mystery of the slowburn-psychological-family-drama variety. But delve deeper and it is an oblique political statement that follows in the tradition of Picnic at Hanging Rock – another film in which the Australian landscape steals away white children.
Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes are the parents of the missing children, with Hugo Weaving as the police officer following the clues; as the case progresses, a sandstorm descends on their remote desert mining town. That red dust renders the outback, generally so wide-open on film, an usually tightly-sealed world — a hazy claustrophobic space in which writer-director Kim Farrant evades easy certainties about what it means to raise families in a continent defined by colonialism, fossil-fuel capitalism and ancestral disconnection.
Film: Captain America: Civil War (2016, USA), directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo – out 31 January
In the world of Captain America: Civil War, after a rampaging superhero disaster causes countless civilian deaths, the US government introduces a Hero Registration Act: a law that limits superheroes’ actions, causing a deep rift between them all. OK! It’s almost as if Marvel has been forced to admit the Avengers are essentially an elite killing squad dropping buildings on civilians and getting away with brutal violence to serve an abstract American greater good.
From today’s war-ridden, refugee-afflicted vantage point, the whole “save the world using boys and bullets” mandate of superhero films evidently doesn’t really fly anymore.
With everything from a crime-fighting spider manboy in a onesie to fairly glib themes of good and evil and the nature of revenge, the film makes subzero sense. But as a non-nerd I appreciated its levity and buoyancy — so many comic-book movies have such a self-serious weight hanging about them. The most fascinating aspect is the new Black Panther character: an African king and warrior with a wonderful leopard-y costume. His role here anticipates his own full movie, which could make the Marvel Universe deeper and richer. It’s almost enough to make you forget the film is essentially a $200 million ad for games and toys and backpacks and other licensed merchandise. Yay for deep-fried, lobotomised entertainment!
TV: Crazyhead season one (2016, UK), created by Howard Overman – out now
Buffy The Vampire Slayer secured the place of kick-arse teen demon hunters in popular culture forever. A mash-up of genres, Netflix’s new original series moves the same basic idea to contemporary England, with sly British humour and zippy present-day vocab to match.
Our heroines Amy and Raquel are a classic crime-fighting pair: ostensibly mismatched but with kindred spirits. Having both been diagnosed by pale male psychiatrists as psychotic, they realise their hellish visions are real, and therefore even scarier than mental illness. Though the opening shot references cinema’s king of art-house psychological horror, David Lynch, the vibe here is much more youthful – think of the weird comedy of Ghostbusters crossed with Trainspotting — with the series’ wry sideways comment on mental-health treatment, and its focus on female friendship, deepening its message.
Honourable mentions: Freaky Friday (2003) (film, 4 January), A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV, 13 January), Fargo: Season 1 (TV, 26 January)
Stan
Film: Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001, Mexico), directed by Alfonso Cuarón – out 4 January
Stan continues its mandate of programming reliable, contemporary art-house classics.
Upon its 2002 release, the Guardian called Alfonso Cuarón’s coming-of-age drama, in which two testosterone-rattled teens take an older woman on a road trip, “an exhilarating adventure in narrative, eroticism and social commentary ... combining social analysis, political insight and an unflinching glimpse into the secret lives of these apparently ingenuous young boys. It is as if the American Pie DVD had a director’s commentary by Susan Sontag or JK Galbraith.”
Perhaps viewers and critics at the time were less scandalised by the film’s depiction of masturbation, group sex and infidelity than Cuaron’s refusal to morally judge his characters for what others might see as promiscuity. From the perspective of 2017, Y Tu Mama Tambien was far ahead of its time in discussing sex as a normal part of life – an attitude carried forward today in screen stories including Transparent, Elle and Blue is the Warmest Colour.
Film: Hunger (2008, UK/Ireland), directed by Steve McQueen – out 3 January
Dramatising the 1981 hunger-strike of Irish dissident Bobby Sands, the debut film of Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is not an easy-viewing choice for a night in, but an affecting one for its refusal to either romanticise or condemn those at the heart of the political struggle.
“[An] explicit, but icily brilliant and superbly acted film,” wrote Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw in 2008. “It is a lacerating portrait of an agonised period of British and Irish history…. [which] paints the hunger strike as tragic but quite without tragic grandeur. The movie shows Sands himself as an intelligent, motivated man, but one who long ago hardened heart and mind to the consequences of violence.”
Film: Amour (2012, France), directed by Michael Haneke – out 11 January
That septuagenerian Michael Haneke’s film Amour begins with a crime scene says much about the art-house auteur’s perverse perspective on his central theme.
Most films about love show the beginning or the break-up of a relationship. This one, which won five-star reviews and the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes Film Festival upon its 2012 release, is about the end of a life: a portrait of a relationship in the face of ageing and illness. How you see it will depend on your existing worldview. I see it as equal parts romance – showing small moments of kindness and devotion between an elderly couple nearing the end of their time together – and anti-romance, in that it recognises “forever” has an end date.
Haneke’s long, static shots are the perfect vessel for his steadfast vision of love without idealism, in a film the Guardian painted as “a passionate, painful, intimate drama”.
Honourable mentions: Antichrist (film, 17 January), Swimming Pool (film, 31 January).
Foxtel Play
Top of The Lake season one (2014, UK/NZ), created by Jane Campion – out 5 January
One of the most acclaimed series in recent years, Top of the Lake is an emotionally-spooky crime mystery – and the product of yet another filmmaker migrating to television to explode her storytelling vocabulary.
In this missing-girl mystery, young detective Robin (Elisabeth Moss) returns to her misty mountain hometown to solve the disappearance of a pregnant twelve-year-old, and confront her own history of abuse. Creator Jane Campion positions women as the engine of a genre which has traditionally revolved around men.
The Guardian’s David Renshaw wrote: “With films such as The Piano on her CV, Campion is renowned for pushing strong female characters to the fore, as well as boasting an eye-catching visual style and a tendency to veer toward the more esoteric end of story-telling. Top of the Lake is no different and sees Elisabeth Moss deliver a stunning central performance as an idealistic detective hunting for the truth in a male-dominated world.” Brush up before season two’s release.
Honourable mentions: Westworld season one (TV, out now), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (film, out now).
Dendy Direct
Deepwater Horizon (2016, USA), directed by Peter Berg – out 18 January
Sunrise, a wide-shot of an oil drilling rig, all semi-submersed concrete and spindley cranes rising from the silvery Gulf of Mexico. As day turns to night on 20 April 2010, pressure builds in the rig, culminating in the release millions of tonnes of mud and oil. The explosion generates the worst oil spill in history and the death of a dozen workers.
Deepwater Horizon may sound like an environmental doco, but instead it’s a $70 million action drama in the tradition of 1990s disaster films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact and Twister. The threat is not an earthquake, or an alien invasion, but a fossil fuel company (BP) personified by a chronically irresponsible manager played with evil relish by John Malkovich, with the good guys framed as all-American, working class boys, headed up by Mark Wahlberg.
As the ecological foundations of multinational capitalism grow ever more unstable, Hollywood is raiding what might have been fringe political material for art-house filmmakers of previous generations. The result is a smart, taut action film (with a salty slug of US patriotism, of course) – a great antidote to the CGI-driven comic-book franchises that usually dominate this genre.
Honourable mentions: Cleverman (TV, out now), Sully (film, out now), Girl Asleep (film, out now), Louder Than Bombs (film, out 11 January).
SBS On Demand
TV: Shaun Micallef’s Stairway To Heaven (2016, AU) – weekly from 18 January
There’s a touch of the Louis Theroux approach to this documentary series by self-described “semi-professional comedian” Shaun Micallef. Both men take the persona of an affable, perplexed outsider, embedding themselves in worlds of extreme beliefs and fringe scenarios. But Catholic-raised Micallef’s brand of dry, sceptical humour allows for a bit more incisiveness, and is ideally suited to this series about religion.
The first episode of the three-part second series sees Micallef fly to Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the USA’s biggest homegrown religion, the Mormon Church, which believes Jesus Christ visited America, and that the Garden of Eden was somewhere in Missouri. But rather than just presenting Mormons as people on the margins of mainstream society, Micallef shows the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be a powerful and controlling institution with vast resources and economic power (and its own PR department, of course) — only a few steps away, one suspects, from the full-blown Scientologist scale.
Film: Bulkland (2015, China), directed by Daniel Whelan – out now
Did you know that the plastics industry has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global financial crisis? As the top-end of the retail market has fallen away and demand for cheaper goods has risen, trinket-laden dollar value stores have doubled in number in the USA, and now outnumber pharmacies.
This scary, clever feature-length TV documentary scratches underneath the “Made in China” label, examining the free market’s addiction to disposable crud by tracing the plastics industry backwards to Yiwu, China: the world’s largest small commodity wholesale district, and essentially a plastics city.
The doco is careful not to blame China, instead showing how nonsense goods – such as life-sized, singing Santa Clauses – are being produced for the West, and interviewing the Western importers who have made their riches from this increasingly unstable market. In exposing the industrial origins of conspicuous consumerism, Bulkland shows the unimaginable scale, fake abundance and absurdity of a market dedicated to producing goods destined for sudden landfill.
Honourable mentions: This is Australia film collection, featuring Erskineville Kings and Mad Dog Morgan (out now, with further releases throughout January).
ABC iView
Comedy Next Gen: Zoë Coombs Marr (2016, Australia) – out now
For those like me who missed this show in its live incarnation, this ABC2 comedy special sandwiches Zoë Coombs Marr’s weird meta theatre comedy creation, Trigger Warning, with interviews with the artist.
Her character is Dave, a deluded comedian and male bogan idiot who Coombs Marr uses to satirise stand-up comedy’s aggressively blokey culture. Dave sees himself as a good bloke and upholds “battle of the sexes” jokes as the pinnacle of comic thought. He’s equal parts affable and fragile, an out-of-his-depth dinosaur descending into madness as the show catapults forward, departing the usual conventions of a one-hour comedy format.
