Whimsical - 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.
French Film Festival
Ah the French Film Festival. Automatically there's a high bar right? After all France is considered the birthplace of cinema, not just of stripy shirts and carbs. This year's festival pulls out the big guns as well, including one of the most anticipated biopics of the year: Gainsbourg - all about ol' Mr Fistful of Gitanes himself.
Where The Wild Things Are
Well, the hipster event of the year is finally here. In turning Maurice Sendak's 338-word evocation of childhood rage into a 101-minute movie, have Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers done justice to the memories of Generation Coolsie? Well, yes and no.
Max Records is just brilliant as Max. He's sparky and articulate, but not in a creepily precocious, Haley Joel Osment way.
Paper Heart
This pseudo-doco-rom-com claims to be both a heartwarming examination of how love can conquer cynicism and a sharp comment on the contrivances of documentary filmmaking. It doesn't really succeed at either. Instead, it feels contrived, dull and supremely cynical.
Ostensibly, LA musician-comedian Charlyne Yi and director Nicholas Jasenovec are investigating why Yi doesn't believe in love, and when professional alt-nebbish Michael Cera takes a fancy to Yi the documentary begins to follow the pair's courtship.
500 Days Of Summer
UPDATE: OUR PREVIEW SCREENING IS NOW FULL! EEP, IT WAS NEVER LIKE THIS PRE TWITTER.
Rom-coms tend to unfold over days or weeks. This one takes a more realistic year and a half. 500 Days Of Summer is not exactly a documentary, since Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (aka "bargain basement Heath Ledger") are still improbably gorgeous and articulate.
Away We Go
When the Chinese government gives MIFF lemons - or takes them away, whatevz - MIFF makes lemonade! Away We Go, a Sam Mendes comedy scripted by hipster-and-wife team Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, isn't out in cinemas until October 29, but you can see it TONIGHT! Then you can get back to worrying how far into your thirties you can sustain your "things'll work out" mentality.
Billy The Kid
Billy is a 15-year-old from small-town Maine. He's a funny, articulate dork with an imagination, a propensity to say exactly what he's thinking, and an appetite for pop culture.
Jennifer Vendetti's documentary portrait has won critical praise and awards across the world (including the audience prize at MIFF 2007).
MIFF - Frontier of Dawn
When even a MIFF audience leaves the cinema muttering that a film is "too French", you know it must be very French indeed. A tortured romance by post-New Wave director Philippe Garrel - and starring his dreamy son, Louis - Frontier of Dawn's languid predictability didn't fare so well at Cannes.
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