Epic - Watch - DVDs, Movies, TV Shows
WATCH is ThreeThousand's guide to movies in Melbourne. While we focus on art-house and independent releases, we never shun our secret pop-culture pleasures. WATCH also has its fingers on the pulse of film-festivals and specially programmed events and we give tickets away every week. We have also been known to organise special preview screenings, which we always chicken out of introducing on the microphone before the previews start playing.
Heavy Metal Gangs of Wadeye
Heavy metal has been around for quite a while now and its fan base has never wavered. While trends in music can come and go - and their accolades with them - heavy metal fans are about as pig headedly loyal as they come.
Heavy metal has also apparently reached beyond stadiums and suburban living rooms, where you head-bang along to Guitar Hero, all the way up to Wadeye, NT.
The Feature
It's a big ask for an audience to sit still for three hours. I know because I have a real 'thing' about long films - call it the John Waters 90-minute-rule. To describe Michel Auder's The Feature as 'epic' is an understatement - even though it ends up being both an enjoyable (if surreal) feat of endurance.
Red Cliff
Nobody intuitively grasps the poetics of action like John Woo. And this stunning Chinese historical epic shows the veteran director at the top of his game, blending military tactics and feats of battlefield athleticism with lyrical moments of music, poetry and tea ceremony. The most expensive Asian-financed movie ever, Red Cliff was originally released in two parts.
MIFF - Arse kicking
You've probably seen the Star Wars kid on Youtube. Well, when I was 18 years old, living in a small country town in New Zealand and consuming nothing but anchovies, blunts and candy from the liquor store, I was influenced by Tai-Chi Master Jet Li. It ended with week-long spells in my dressing gown eating nothing but plain bowls of rice.
MIFF - Anna Karina and other icons
I wonder if, when MIFF was looking to bring out a guest for their fest, they considered the overexposed likes of TomKat or Sasha Baron Cohen and then went, "Screw it, we might as well go for someone that has cred."
The result? French New Wave darling Anna Karina is coming to town! Watch as Francophiles, fashionistas and film freaks alike move like homing beacons towards the many Karina-related events that showcase her talents beyond Godard's muse.
Milk
Harvey Milk is the gay community's Martin Luther King: an openly gay politician who agitated for equal civil rights and encouraged homosexuals to abandon the closet. He was gunned down in 1978 by a disgruntled fellow San Francisco city supervisor, Dan White.
Gus Van Sant's simultaneously intimate and sweeping biopic incorporates real archival footage: the opening sequence showing arrests at '60s gay bars is especially powerful.
Focus On: William Klein
William Klein? Didn't he own a chain of discount jewellery stores in the '80s? No, fool. New York-born fashion photographer Klein broke new ground at French Vogue from 1955 to 1965, then tore France a new one as a filmmaker. Hunter S. Thompson meets Austin Powers.
ACMI's retrospective of his nutty, stylish films kicks off tonight with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), the tale of a swingin' '60s model chased by a TV documentary director anticipates our contemporary obsession with reality TV and celeb culture.
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