Peter Machen on ‘Mirror Mirror’

Posted on March 15, 2012 by admin
Film: Mirror Mirror
Country: USA
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Tarsem Singh
Screenwriters: Marc Klein, Jason Keller
Starring: Julia Roberts, Lily Collins, Armie Hammer, Nathan Lane
Review: Peter Machen
♥

Anyone making a contemporary version of Snow White will have to compete with Walt Disney’s beautifully animated 1937 rendition of the Grimm Brother’s classic fairy tale. Disney understood the relationship between magic and terror (as opposed to mere horror) and while his Snow White and the Seven Dwarves overflows with beautifully drawn vitality and charm, it also reaches with full intensity into the depths of darkness. The wicked witch is not simply a bad person, she is evil incarnate, with the power of hell at her command. Continue reading →

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Peter Machen on ‘Otelo Burning’

Posted on March 1, 2012 by admin
Film: Otelo Burning
Country: South Africa
Year of Release: 2011
Director: Sarah Blecher
Screenwriters: James Whyle, Sarah Blecher
Starring: Thomas Gumede, Jafta Mamabolo, Tshepang Mohlomi, Nolwazi Shange and Sihle Xaba
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥½

I watched Otelo Burning at its premiere at the Durban International Film Festival last year. Eight months later, with the movie opening on the local circuit, it is still burned clearly into my memory. Continue reading →

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Peter Machen on ‘Goethe’

Posted on November 4, 2011 by admin
Film: Goethe
Country: Germany
Year of Release: 2010
Director: Philipp Stolzl
Screenwriter:
Starring: Miriam Stein, Alexander Fehling
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥

Goethe is loosely based on The Sorrows of Young Werther, a prose work consisting of a series of letters which first brought German poet and novelist Johan Goethe (played by Alexander Fehling in the film) popular fame. Telling the semiautobiographical story of the writer’s youthful sojourn in the fictional village of Wahlheim and his enchantment with a beautiful young woman named Charlotte Buff (Miriam Stein) who becomes engaged to a businessman (Moritz Bleibtreu) some years older than her, director Philipp Stolzl’s biopic is a big budget historical drama that is short on both history and drama. Fusing details from Goethe’s story with the arc of his rise to fame, the film provides scant evidence of the complexity of Goethe’s powerful mind, presenting instead a genial and adorable puppy of a man. Continue reading →

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Sarah Dawson on ‘The Turin Horse’

Posted on July 21, 2011 by admin
Film: The Turin Horse
Country: Hungary
Year of Release: 2010
Director: Béla Tarr
Screenwriters: Béla Tarr, László Krasznahorkai
Starring: János Derzsi, Erika Bók and Mihály Kormos
Review: Sarah Dawson

Béla Tarr began his career in film at age 10, acting in Hungarian TV adaptations of Tolstoy. And he has ended it with The Turin Horse, which he has said to be his last film, . Tarr’s first choice of career was philosophy, but he was not allowed entry to university after having criticised the Hungarian government at the age of 16, and so he went full time into making film. And the world should be grateful for this, because, in this misfortune a master was born. Continue reading →

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Todd Solondz – From Happiness to Wartime

Posted on July 17, 2010 by admin
Todd Solondz is one of contemporary America’s most important film directors, pulling apart the elasticated morality of his subjects with one part love, two parts caustic soda. Peter Machen spoke to him about Life During Wartime, his sequel of sorts to the groundbreaking 1998 film Happiness.

Director Todd Solondz has the reputation of being the enfant terrible of American cinema. But this must surely be linked to his provocative style of film-making rather than his personality, because in conversation he is unfailingly nice, polite to a fault, and entirely without arrogance. Continue reading →

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Sarah Dawson on ‘Antichrist’

Posted on October 23, 2009 by admin
Film: Antichrist
Country: Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/Poland
Year of Release: 2009
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenwriter: Lars von Trier
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Storm Acheche Sahlstrøm
Review: Sarah Dawson

I read somewhere a description of Lars von Trier as the Marquis de Sade of the film world. Not hard to believe after his outright humiliation of Nicole Kidman in Dogville. But if indeed he revels in the pain of others for the sake of it, I wonder how much of a kick he would have got out of watching me for the last three weeks trying to pen some kind of coherent review of his latest film, Antichrist. Continue reading →

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Oliver Hermanus – A New Cinema

Posted on July 25, 2009 by admin
Peter Machen spoke to director Oliver Hermanus about his debut film Shirley Adams when it premiered at the Durban International Film Festival.

Oliver Hermanus is driving when I phone him. He prefers it that way. It makes it easier for him to think. While he heads down the highway, I circle my balcony, talking eagerly to the director of what is easily one of the finest films produced in more than a century of South African film (admittedly, it is a sparsely populated century). Continue reading →

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Gregg Araki – The Mysteries Within Us

Posted on March 9, 2005 by admin
Peter Machen speaks to American independent filmmaker Gregg Araki about Mysterious Skin, his remarkable new film about youth, paedophilia and the dreams and illusions from which we construct our personal narratives.

For more than 15 years American independent film maker Gregg Araki has been directing films that explore youth and sexuality with bravery and candour. And while he has had some degree of commercial success with films such as The Living End, Doom Generation and Nowhere, it is his latest film Mysterious Skin which has finally propelled Araki’s work into the mainstream of American consciousness. Continue reading →

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Larry Clark – For Real

Posted on July 22, 2002 by admin
I spoke to artist Larry Clark, the man behind the controversial movie Kids, and now, the even more controversial and emotionally honest film Ken Park.

Larry Clark spent the ’70s and ’80s in a stupor of drugs and alcohol, all the while documenting the disintegrating margins of the world around him, most famously in Tulsa, his series of photographic essays on the teenage sub-cultures that populate the eponymous middle-American town in Oklahoma. Continue reading →

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Fernando Meirelles – Living and Dying on the Streets of Brazil

Posted on July 6, 2002 by admin
Peter Machen talks to director Fernando Meirelles about his extraordinary action film City of God.

The multi-award winning film City of God chronicles the lives of Brazilian street children living in a sprawling housing settlement on the outskirts of Rio, named the City of God by its residents. It is an extraordinary film, an instant classic that stretches the limits of cinema while at all times being just as engaging as say Pulp Fiction or Terminator 2. Continue reading →

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