I love you, PeePee

I remember years ago sitting in a beer garden somewhere with fellow Milkcrate writer, Soira, telling her about my love of Parker Posey.

The night before I'd had a dream about her singing "God Loves A Terrier" from Best In Show to me [which she didnt sing in the film, which is a shame]. I believe this was because before I went to bed I was listening to Ryan Adams album Rock'N'Roll where she lends her somewhat surprising backing vocals to and wrote a song together.

Anyway, I spend a great many drunken hours preaching about the wonders of Parker Posey - or PeePee as I like to call her, that night.

She had just broken up with Ryan Adams, and I was a little heartbroken. I missed reading interviews where she's mentioned nosing around and sometimes taking part on the interview. I missed reading blogs reporting that the writer had just spotting them in a comic shop/video shop /walking down the street off their chops at any time of the day/night. They were my ideal couple - both a bit spazz and so very wonderful.

It pained me to see photos of Ryan wearing a Batman shirt while she was off filming Superman Returns. I wanted them to sort out their strange way of bickering and just get back together so my favourite nutbag actress and my favourite nutbag musician can be in nutbag-love again.

She's one of those actresses that is amazing and hilarious and steals every scene she's in [and knows how to play the mandolin!] and I believe she's very underused.

Parker Posey Trivia:
Did you know that PeePee was considered for the role of Rachel in Friends?
Did you know that PeePee was considered for the role that went to Cameron Diaz in My Best Friends Wedding?

If she had got both of those roles, I probably would be a fan of both.
Friends would have been unmissable instead of being unbearable. Imagine Rupert Everett and PeePee in the same film together!

Why doesnt she get all the roles she deserves? I think I've figured the reason.
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, home and playground for John Waters, Tori Amos, John Astin [who played Gomez Addams in the tv series The Addams Family], David Byrne of Talking Heads, David Hasselhoff , Jeff Koons [strange artist who made a sculpture of a puppy out of flowers], Jada Pinkett-Smith [who is now a scientologist] and Sisqó [the guy who did that 'Thong Song'.

As you can see from that list, there's something in the water in Baltimore. It makes you unconventional and a little strange.

PeePee started out on television in a daytime soap opera. I cant quite imagine her being in a soap opera unless its a scene in a Christopher Guest mockumentary (if you havenit seen For Your Consideration or Best In Show, you MUST).

I was so happy to hear that she's going to be in John Waters new film, Fruitcake. Its a match made in [Baltimore] heaven!

I haven't seen You've Got Mail that stars the two most obnoxious people in the world bar Julia Roberts, but apparently PeePee's in that. I bet she's amazing. And she almost saved Superman Returns from being the big pile of steaming torturingly bad dogshit that we know it as. Even Kevin "I'm in the closet and I'm never ever, ever, coming out!" Spacey couldn't save that wreck. I went and saw that in the cinema just because she was in it.
See, that's how much I love Pee Pee.

[Dear PeePee, get back with Ryan, for the sake of the children! ie. me!]

Note added by NikkiMaloo: The ever-charming Parker Posey also plays the title character in Fay Grim, which opens at independent cinemas around Melbourne tomorrow. This almost-parody film about espionage sees PeePee jetted to France in order to recover some books written by her former husband in the director's last film Henry Fool, which, instead of being the boring jibberish they were initially deemed as, turn out to be code containing U.S. political secrets and are being hunted globally by the Russian AND Arabic governments. Sounds like a lot of twoddle doesn't it? Well it is, but Parker Posey shines through.

A Movie to See - Southland Tales

Holy crap, I loved this movie.

As it was dollar Tuesday at the local video rental place and a day off work for me, I was at the video shop early. My only problem: Trying to find something that's not crap. I find it terribly hard to find movies that aren't entirely predictable. I mostly hope to get a few surprises along the way before reaching an obvious ending.

I grabbed a few dvds off the shelf that I hadn't heard too much about. One was Gabriel, a thoroughly disappointing film about archangels fighting for control of purgatory. It seemed like it could've been something special but it wasn't. Maybe some more research and a few more script drafts first.

The second was Tin Man, a mini-series "based" on The Wizard of Oz. There wasn't a great deal to it but it was a bit of fun. Unfortunately the video shop clerk forgot the second dvd. I'll have to watch the final part tomorrow, after bruising some skulls.

The third was Southland Tales. I saw the cover. The words "Sarah Michelle Gellar" slapped me across the face. As a long time Buffy fan, I immediately picked it up.

"I think I heard something about this a while back," I thought to myself. "Doesn't Buffy play a porn star?"

And so, without closer inspection of the cover of the dvd, I paid my three dollars and took my pile of plastic home for an afternoon of entertainment.

Later that night, after being thoroughly pissed that I couldn't watch the end of Tin Man, I grumpily threw the Southland Tales dvd into the machine.

Four seconds into the movie I got my first surprise.

I paused. "Did someone say my favourite phrase - The end of the world?"

I immediately perked up. I have a penchant for end of the world stories.

Then came the cast. A number of familiar faces popped up all through the movie. One in particular was Christopher Lambert. I had only yesterday been thinking about an old movie of his called Nirvana and wondered to myself whether he'd made anything recently. Well, I got my answer.

Then, around the time that Jon Lovitz arrived on screen and did his dirty deed, I knew I loved this movie. I watched as the strings that would soon intertwine each revealed themselves.

I wondered, "Who came up with this hilarious and brilliant piece of work?"

I found out on the imdb that it was Richard Kelly. Writer of another favourite of mine - Donnie Darko, another movie I had picked up knowing nothing about, except that it starred "that guy from Bubble Boy".

I watched on and began to notice several similarities between Donnie Darko and Southland Tales. For instance, they both feature a character with a bullet wound to the eye.

Also, much like Donnie Darko, when the credits rolled I sat fixated on the screen.

Ground Up

Hyped literally to death, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 1970s-style exploitation double bill Grindhouse flopped so disastrously in the United States that its release in Australia was delayed for almost a year. But now, finally, for just a few days more at the Astor, we're getting the whole enchilada: 193 minutes of blood, sex and all-round mayhem, complete with hokey censorship warnings and funny trailers for imaginary films from a range of guest directors.

On paper, Rodriguez's Texan horror-sci-fi hybrid Planet Terror might look like a full meal all by itself, with zombies, go-go-dancers, crazy babysitters, and a last-minute plot twist involving the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. But in practice the multiple hooks don't hook together: the film achieves but does not transcend the status of a disjointed B-movie best watched late at night in a venue where attention can freely wander.

Tarantino's infinitely superior, full-to-bursting Death Proof is many things: a slasher movie on wheels, a love letter to stuntmen and stuntwomen, an examination of the sado-masochistic drives underlying narrative. Every last detail is openly fetishised, above all when it comes to the actresses: Vanessa Ferlito's wiggling buttocks, Zoe Bell's New Zealand accent, Rose McGowan's smart mouth and platinum blonde hair.

Less sympathetic viewers may fail to realise that the point of it all isn't camp excess so much as a desire to return cinema to its origins, which means the 1970s only because this is roughly when these filmmakers happened to grow up. Indeed, Grindhouse in its entirety could be seen
as a treatise on the medium's two basic, opposed impulses: towards fantasy, and towards documentary.

Thus Planet Terror is built around a digitally-manufactured image - a woman with a machine gun in place of her right leg - which would have been inconceivable in the heyday of big-screen exploitation. By contrast, spectacle in Death Proof consists primarily of stunts performed in front of the camera by performers genuinely risking life and limb.

It remains slightly anomalous for Tarantino and Rodriguez should be campaigning to bring down-and-dirty thrills back to the movie theatre, given that cheaply-made action-horror is hardly extinct (the distance between Planet Terror and, say, the Resident Evil franchise is not that great). There is, moreover, a level of failure built into the whole project of recreating an ideally unselfconscious movie-going experience in the fussiest way imaginable, lovingly simulating every last scratch on a supposedly beat-up print.

The genius of Death Proof is that Tarantino grasps this perversity and runs with it all the way to the end. Rodriguez, for his part, seems blithely unaware of the problem. But maybe that's the reason the association between these two has lasted - because Tarantino knows, in
his heart, that his friend is the pure naive artist he could never be.

Grindhouse (MA) screens nightly at the Astor Theatre, Melbourne, till March 30.

Film Review - There Will Be Blood

In the first scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood a solo prospector laboriously chipping away while the score buzzes in your ears almost like the landscape might if you were there. When the prospector falls down the mine shaft breaking his leg, it’s almost a testament to his desire for fortune when he hauls himself slowly back up to the world.

Later, we see the prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a smooth talking, self proclaimed ‘oil man’, has worked his way to success, toting his young son around and canvassing himself as a family man, as he tenders for mining leases in small townships until one day, after a tip off, he sets his sites on Little Boston.

Plainview is a misanthropist: “There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking” he says, and when he meets Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), he makes no exception. Plainview wants no one to succeed, and when Sunday mirrors Plainview’s opportunistic behaviour, things escalate.

Margaret Pomerance coined this as a film about American greed, but in my opinion, There Will Be Blood is more about a struggle for power, a struggle to be above other men.
This film is up for 8 Oscar Nominations, including best actor for Day-Lewis. The character of Daniel Plainview is so wonderfully complex and well portrayed; the dynamics between director and actor are almost too good to be true.

There Will Be Blood opened 9th February and is playing at all good cinemas in Melbourne.

Related links: IMDB Entry for There Will Be Blood

Film Review - Joy Division

We Built This City On Rock'n'Roll

According to Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division, in 1976, Manchester was an industrial city in ruin, desperately in need of being rebuilt by a punk rock movement, a movement which was created on the 4th of June when Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook separately attended the infamous Sex Pistols show at Manchester Lesser Trade Hall.

In this chronological re-telling of the history of the late 70s rock band, Joy Division rose from the broken and shattered remains of Manchester and ‘rebuilt’ the city with their bare hands with the release of their critically acclaimed debut Unknown Pleasures.

While this depiction is romantic, and their music had the British media performing cartwheels, months after their debut they still played to a "void in front of the stage" as band member Stephen Morris recalls. The layering between shots of Manchester in ruins and present day locations of former venues (titled in sequence as 'Things That Are Not There') suggest a desolate wasteland remaining without hope since the suicide of Ian Curtis in 1980.

The film is abundant with appearances from Joy Division’s remaining band members, and many others who were associated with the rise of the band (including the late Tony Wilson) however the re-counts seem too polished, almost scripted even.

While a great education for those with little exposure to the band, avid fans will gain little more than reaffirmation of facts that have been well documented in the past and while the film features rare archive footage and recordings from Joy Division’s short career, much of it is poor quality. Little mention is made of the hub of music surrounding Joy Division during that period, nor their impact of musicians around them.

Compared with Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic Control, Joy Division is less visually appealing and fails to pull the heart-strings, instead aiming to stick to the facts and remove the mystery behind the myth.

But in truth, as former band members re-tell the days leading up to the sudden end of Joy Division, you get the lasting impression that none of these men really, ever knew what was going on in the world and mind of Ian Curtis, nor do they know now.