Make a therapy appointment now - 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.
Brothers
"Sounds Biblical," was my initial summary of this domestic melodrama. Kinda - its characters are more like figures in a parable than individual human beings. But Jim Sheridan's powerful, intimate remake of the 2004 Danish original offers little salvation. Bleak, uncertain, Brothers is a fable that's lost its moral.
Jean Paul Gaultier on Film
Now that he's over 50 can Jean Paul Gaultier still hold claim to his 'enfant terrible' title? It's been a few years since we saw him mooning anyone or send a tin can bracelet down a runway.
Perhaps the enfant terrible successor (if it's not Tavi) is in fact doco director and all round fashion geek Loic Prigent.
The Hurt Locker
Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the kind of maverick that war movies so often ask us to admire: fearless, resourceful, wisecracking and soft-hearted with kids. But screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow slowly reveal the devastating truth: James is totally fucked in the head... and he likes it that way.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
The Butthole Surfers, the bloody Butthole Surfers. Why is it that every time I see a music doco about some unstable dude who should never take drugs in the first place, take drugs, the Butthole Surfers pop up and are somehow involved?
I can't blame them for it but I do find it highly suspicious. But then ya listen to their version of 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' and all is forgiven.
Nine
Nine marshalls a galaxy of stars in stupendous musical setpieces: Penélope Cruz sliding down a swag of pink satin as if it were a banister; Kate Hudson's flirty, flashbulb-dazzled fashion runway; Fergie's beachside tarantella with arcs of sand cascading from tambourines. But based on the Broadway musical, based on Federico Fellini's film 8½, based on Fellini's own life, Nine feels as weighed down by intertextual references as a Folies Bergère showgirl by sequins and feathers.
A Serious Man
Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film is an absolute winner. Surreal, richly allusive and cruelly hilarious, it narrates a decent man's struggle to reason his way out of a maze of absurd injustice.
Minneapolis, 1967, and physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is stressing about making tenure amid an anonymous whispering campaign against him and a possible attempt to bribe him.
Astro Boy
The 1980s cartoon series based on Osamu Tezuka's manga was one of my formative pop-cultural experiences. I remember it being quite dark and existential. That, and Astro would regularly drop from the sky like a stone, moaning, "My energyyyy..." I've had mobiles with better battery life.
This plasticky CGI retelling gives Astro an improved power source - a mysterious blue bauble.
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