Don’t be misled by the title. There’s a lot more oil than blood. An oil driller, Daniel, ruthlessly makes a fortune in the early years of the twentieth century in southern USA, while locking heads with an ambitious young preacher.

I understand the great reviews this film’s getting. It’s excellently made: such beautiful scenes and accomplished film-making. It has the confidence and feel of a truly great epic.

Yet it didn’t connect with me. I didn’t feel much for the characters, except perhaps the preacher, who I wanted to be good. I wanted him to show there’s hope and goodness in the world, but there isn’t in the world of this film. Or maybe a bit, in the form of Daniel’s adopted son and Mary, the girl who befriends him.

7/10

Bob Dylan has been so many personas, so many people, that Todd Haynes’ film uses different actors playing different characters to represent him - the black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie after the musician, Arthur Rimbaud the precocious teen poet, a movie star who’s lost his way, a folk singer who’s sold out (or not), the born again Christian (briefly) and Billy the Kid.

It is a beautiful film, made with such skill. I was mesmerised by the torrent of images, the unexpected twists, the variety of genres employed. It is a film for film-lovers.

It made me wonder what it takes to be as famous, enduring and influential as Bob Dylan. It made me feel so inadequate in how I’ve lived my own life. I don’t want to be him or even like him, but I would like to have his energy and capacity for adventure.

The part I liked best was the single scene representing Dylan’s born-again phase. He gives an impromptu, incoherent talk to the congregation about Jerusalem and faith and God and then sings this wonderful song from an album I don’t have. It looks just like a church in the 80s, and the idea of the legendary singer playing out his days in a small church is fascinating.

The film doesn’t resolve, though. There’s no climax, and I think there should be. The way Magnolia brings its strands together - just slightly - into a glorious chorus and a plague of frogs. Haynes needed something like that to lift this film from being interesting and inspiring to brilliant.

8.5/10

I feel so lucky to have seen so many good films in 2007. I loved living close to a good cinema for the first time in my life. And I am more convinced than ever that cinemas are the place to watch film. There’s something so asocial and boring about a city of people sitting in their own air-conditioned castles watching DVDs on home cinema systems. Give me the ruined grandeur of an old cinema any day. 

1. The Science of Sleep
A true translation of the magic of dreams and a sweet but smart romance.

2. Atonement
A moving and beautiful drama about love, fiction and redemption.

3. Death At A Funeral
The funniest film I’ve seen in years.

4. Pan’s Labyrinth
A dark and violent parable. 

5. Amazing Grace
I was inspired.

6. Noise
Engaging Australian police drama.

7. The Prestige
Elaborate and surprising steampunk thriller.

8. 28 Weeks Later
Scary thriller authentically post-apocalypse.

9. The Lives of Others
It’s rare for a film this long to hold my attention so utterly.

10. Across the Universe
An enchanting vision of a mystical sixties.

The rest of the world got to see Atonement months ago, but its official release in Australia was yesterday, Boxing Day. The Windsor Cinema - just metres from my house - had sneak previews last weekend, and so I got to see it a few days before most of Australia.

Of course, the film didn’t live up to my experience of the novel - but I was still impressed. (There was no chance of it being an equivalent experience, because for me the strength of Ian McEwan’s writing is his description of thought processes and emotions - something that can only be represented externally in a film.)

• The film has the novel’s elegance and intelligence.
• The actor playing the young Briony is perfect. She has a slightly haughty face, yet still likeable; she does precociousness so well.
• Keira Knightley was good as Cecilia but not brilliant. She didn’t have the subtlety I was expecting, the depth behind her words. I often felt like she was talking too quickly. But this might be the effect of the book moving so slowly, giving us each character’s thoughts around each line they deliver.
• The scenes were often excellent, especially the tired troops on the dirty beach at Dunkirk in the midst of the shambolic retreat. The ruined holiday town was perfectly evoked.
• Leon, Cee’s brother, wasn’t good natured enough. The novel’s so clear on his jollyness and generosity.
• I was worried that the war scenes would be extended and become the focus (when they were my least favourite part of the book) - but they weren’t; they were actually shortened.

The ending

The most significant change was the ending, but I thought it was a good change.  Briony actually publishes her version of Atonement, the one with the happy ending, whereas in McEwan’s novel she can’t publish while the Marshalls live for fear of litigation.

Briony’s appearence as an aged woman on the talkshow manages to encapsulate so much sadness, time and wisdom. It’s a compressed version of the epilogue that is nearly as profound as the original. I thought Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as the old Briony was brilliant.

9/10

A brilliant film. A joyous, crazy film about a young man who has always confused dreams and reality and inhabits a world where the two merge. We see a world which works on the principles of his childish imagination, with cameras and cars made of cardboard, time machines which go forward or backward one second, and revenge fantasies lived out.

But at its heart, it’s a beautiful love story between Stephane the Dreaming Inventor and Stephanie the Shy Artist. One critic called it the year’s ultimate date movie, and Nicole and I concur.

Home Song Stories is writer-director Tony Ayres’ personal excorcism of his troubled childhood with his selfish mother, a fading nightclub singer who constantly sought out new men to admire her and excite her.  At the end of the film, the narrator says that he and his sister don’t talk about their mother; they don’t know what to say. Maybe this film will make up for that.

It seems the story is very close to real events, with some minor changes - like moving the action from Perth to Melbourne. It seems that Screenwest just didn’t have enough money to fund this film beyond scripting! They should be funding lots of feature films - it’s the major art form of our time.

I’m guessing Arts Victoria stepped in with some money, on the condition that the action be moved to Melbourne. As a Western Australian, that makes me disappointed - we lose another one of our stories.

If you visit the Metro Cemeteries Board you can see the burial records for both Tony Ayres’ mother, Sue, and his stepfather, Bill Ayres (’Uncle Bill’). Apparently she killed herself in their flat in Applecross. I think I’ll always think of her now if I’m driving along Canning Highway. What a sad story.

http://www.mcb.wa.gov.au/NameSearch/details.php?id=FC00005994

http://www.mcb.wa.gov.au/NameSearch/details.php?id=FC00004118 

The story of William Wilberforce’s parlimentary fight against slavery in Britain and his marriage to Emily.  

I was inspired by the film. I didn’t care how much director Michael Apted was manipulating me, I was barracking for William Wilberforce, I was angry at the capitalist forces which made slavery happen in the first place. I was proud that this man was a Christian.

 I wanted to make a difference like he made a difference. Looking back from where we are, slavery seemed clear as such an abhorrence, the greatest evil that needed fighting. But that moral clarity wouldn’t have existed in the 1790s, not for most people. And we can’t have that ‘moral clarity’ about our own times. It takes someone with prophetic imagination, a man or woman who can see the evils that have been naturalised.

And so what is the equivalent today that we should be fighting for? I’m not sure; I don’t have enough of a prophetic imagination. There’s too much grey in any issue I can think of. It’s clearer for my wife, and I can see where she’s coming from - the virtual slavery of the two-thirds world, making stuff for the first world for a pittance.

Add to this all the related evils of the System: global warming, war, greed.

An Australian survival film, with a gentle sense of humour. A group of refugees are people-smuggled to a remote beach on the Western Australian coast. (It looks like Western Australia, but the film was actually shot in South Australia!) The Iraquis go one way; the Vietnamese another. But in the end, an Iraqui engineer and a Vietnamese youth with an Australian father are forced to journey together with one of the people smugglers, while some larrikin Army reservists chase them.

 It’s an excellent film, resisting easy classification, and Australian in a way thankfully different to most ‘Australian’ films. There are no white leads. The main characters are Middle Eastern, Asian, Aboriginal. It’s refreshing to see the Australian landscape through their eyes.

With so many different languages being spoken, the subtitles are crucial, and they’re well handled. Instead of being added on the bottom, they appear above the head of the character speaking. I guess this is only possible because of the big strips of barren landscape or sky that the text can go over the top of.

For me, the highlight of the film comes when the Iraqui engineer gets an ancient wreck of a ute going on three wheels and driving in reverse, sitting on top of the cabin like a ship.

 The film is set in 1990; I can’t see any good reason why, except perhaps that the film starts in Vietnam 1972, with the youth’s father leaving his pregnant girlfriend. Perhaps left behind during the Vietnam War?