Daniel von Bargen – 1950-2015

Character actor Daniel von Bargen, best known for his work in Sienfeld and Malcolm In The Middle, has passed away.

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Cuddly all over.

It must be tough for animation film-makers to come up with new stuff all the time. Pixar’s launch back with Toy Story has given us all manner of plot devices – talking toys, cars, animals, etc – that you’d expect the genre well to have run dry. Dreamworks, BlueSky (a subsidiary of Fox) and Disney all have their fingers in the animation pie to such a degree, the market is flooded by films of quality so variable it’s become hit-and-miss to stumble across a good one amidst the average. 2014’s glut of films saw gems like The Lego Movie, valiant efforts like The Boxtrolls, and utter rubbish like The Nut Job. Disney’s Big Hero 6, a film based on the comic book series of the same name, came out of the studio’s purchase of the Marvel brand, the comic book behemoth having the rights for the concept buried among their better known titles. In a sliding scale of brilliant to rubbish, Big Hero 6 sneaks well into the “brilliant” zone, and stays there; a pleasant mix of heart, soul, action and adventure.

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This film in one word? Zany.

Yeah, back when Madagascar came out, I was convinced they’d make a feature on that film’s stand-out supporting characters, the Penguins. Three films later, plus a cartoon series, and finally our favorite animated penguin troupe has been given their own feature film to star in. Aimed squarely at the youngsters, with one eye on keeping adults entertained as well, Penguins Of Madagascar is a flat-out riot of pratfalls, animation and jokes, albeit at the expense of character or story.

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Leonard Nimoy – 1931-2015

It’s hard to sum up the impact Leonard Nimoy had on popular culture. The man most famous for portraying the “logical” Vulcan, Spock, who joins Captain Kirk on the Enterprise voyaging across the Galaxy, in the Star Trek franchise, has passed away. And frankly, the world will miss him dearly.

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Nobody likes being underground.

Another “found footage” film, another “documentary being made” premise that turns into a horror story of middling proportions. As Above, So Below, director John Erick Dowdle’s latest film to delve into the dark corners of our nightmares, sees us descend into the bowels of the Parisian catacombs, in search for some mysterious “philospher’s stone”, a literal alchemists Holy Grail, a material said to transmute substances into gold and, in some legends, provide eternal life. Like many films of its ilk, As Above has a fairly interesting, salivatory premise, and a foundation that piqued my interest, but the generic cliches of the genre folded this thing up faster than a house of cards. It’s amazing how much human stupidity ruins the best laid plans, and the bumbling crew of this film’s story inhabit the very poster imagery of human stupidity. As Above, So Below attempts to offer something fresh to the genre, I think, but ultimately, it comes up short. Minor scares and inane acting leave this film one best left in the deep, dark corners, undiscovered.

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Welcome to the first episode of The Ferncast – our official Podcast! – and in it, we take a look at the Oscars of 2015, Marvel’s re-acquisition of Spider-Man into the fold, and other news that’s been around a while.

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Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

A defining Australian success story, Moulin Rouge! marked the third feature film from acclaimed local stage director Bazz Luhrmann, after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. In an era where the film musical no longer existed outside of the Disney studios, Moulin Rouge! not only resurrected the genre, it defined it for an entire generation. No longer restricted by stagey, technologically limited film-making such as that which existed during the musical’s heyday in the 50’s and 60’s, all of Luhrmann’s considerably on-point visual themes and cinematic tricks came to play on what would become the most talked about film of 2001. Garnering both acclaim and a degree of criticism, particularly for its editing (more on this later), Moulin Rouge! famously saw Bazz miss out on a Best Director nomination at that year’s Oscars, whilst the film would be nommed for Best Picture, and would go on to win for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design (a bittersweet moment, Bazz’s wife, Catherine Martin, scored gongs in both categories!). Whether it’s a good film, or a great film, remains a debatable argument we could ramble about for days, but as a film experience there’s no denying Moulin Rouge! is one of a kind.

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So that’s what wrestling does to a man.

True crime is always vastly more thrilling than fictional crime. Okay there’s exceptions to that statement, but I’m not far from the truth here. Foxcatcher is a true crime story, a “Can you believe this” tale involving money, the love of money, and wrestling. If Foxcatcher were a completely fictional story, you’d think it pretty mediocre by Hollywood standards. Thankfully, Foxcatcher is outstanding, led by a trio of terrific performances, including a particularly effective one from Steve Carell. It centers around two wrestling champions, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, who are seconded to John E duPont’s “Foxcatcher Farm” to train athletes to become Olympic level wrestlers. Tatum and Ruffalo are low-key and excellent in their respective roles, with Tatum especially reining in his usual glint-in-the-eye deadpan comedy schtick to provide the film’s core emotional arc.

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So, what happened with Neil Patrick Harris? A guy who usually nails a hosting job had a really, really off night at this years Oscars. Every joke (bar one) felt flat, every moment (bar one) felt contrived and forced, from an actor who is typically a breeze to watch glide through a performance. My huge expectations for Harris’ work went unfulfilled: I thought the “what’s in the box” gag that ran through the show was actually awful, and one of the worst I’ve seen to date in any Oscars ceremony. Its payoff lacked edge, and there was a perfunctorily swift conclusion that told me somebody backstage had said “wrap this thing up Harris, it’s dying a slow death on Twitter”. Indeed, my Twitter feed was flooded with people flat-out annoyed by it.

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Good morning all! Welcome to our official Winners Announcement post for the 87th Academy Awards. Below you’ll find a list of the categories for which somebody, or an honored few, will receive the film industry’s highest honor. As each award is given, we’ll update this post to reflect the most current information. Please refresh this post accordingly throughout the day (Monday afternoon, Monday 23rd, Australian time).

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Well, we’re here again folks. That time of the year when Hollywood gets around its own for a bout of back slapping and hand shaking, most of which is so incestuous it makes incest look sexy. I jest, not really.

With The official Oscar ceremony barely 24 hours away, I’ve rummaged through my expectations and beliefs and come up with a selection of choices for the films I think will take home the gongs. No doubt I’ll be wrong, because I usually am, but I like to think my logic is soundly impaired to the point of being accurate in reverse. I’ve made my picks in all but five of the categories (Foreign Language Film, Feature Documentary, Short Documentary, Animated Short and Live Action Short I have seen none, so can’t make a call on them), so read on and see if my choices match yours!!

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Travel into Infinity.

It would seem that 2014 became the year two English intellectual legends went head to head – Alan Turing, father of modern computer science, led the charge in The Imitation Game, while Stephen Hawking, the legendary cosmologist and theoretical physicist backed it up in The Theory of Everything, two biographical films about people the human race is better for having had amidst us, and two films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The Theory Of Everything has the distinct advantage, however, in that Stephen Hawking is (currently) very much alive, making his stamp on human knowledge and the pop-culture zeitgeist all that much larger now than even twenty years ago.

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Woulda made a great Michael Jackson song.

Selma’s existence would seem, to the outsider, to be Oprah Winfrey’s mission in life to snag herself an Oscar. After The Butler failed to garner the big gongs in 2013, 2014’s “Black Message Movie”, Selma, based on the march of black protesters to gain the right to vote, is purpose built for critical acclaim. Trouble with films designed as Oscar bait is that often they fail to do justice to the story they’re trying to tell purely because they’re trying too hard. Winfrey’s producer role in Selma could be seen as another hit at Oscar (she won’t win it, because there are other films around in 2014 that far outstrip Selma’s grand plans for racial equality) but does that make the film less worthy as a work of art? Selma’s timing couldn’t be more perfect. 2014 was a horrible year for race relations in America. The uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer – who would go without charge or trial, sparking outrage by sectors of the community – and the captured-on-camera death of an unarmed black man on the streets of New York City, by a white police officer, for an offense so unremarkable it’s outrageous with its indifference, catapulted the gap between white America and black America firmly into the world spotlight. For a country led by a black president, the irony wasn’t lost on many. Selma, another in a long line of racially charged cinema outings over the last decade, is perhaps a victim of its own timing more than anything the film-makers do right or wrong. The problems Selma has aren’t so much creative, rather they’re indifference considering the status of American blacks today.

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Each year, comedians snark at the outmoded nature of the Academy Awards – the longest running film awards in America, if not the world. Out of date, antiquated, irrelevant: what exactly do the Academy Awards stand for? At one point, they represented the best of the best, the ultimate achievement in film, at least by Hollywood’s standards. However, as the film industry has become more globalized, and Hollywood films vie for the dollars of those produced in other countries, are the Academy Awards now just another in the endless stream of meaningless awards given out during a few months of each year? It seems every man and his dog gives out awards – newspapers, media commentators, the various guilds and associations to which multiple film industries depend, and on whom the most money is spent. Why, then, when the pool of award tributes is so diluted with “neverheardof’em’s” and “wannabes”, do we still consider the Oscars to be the top of the heap?

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When in doubt, fudge the truth.

The last time the story of the Enigma problem crossed the big screen, it was Dougray Scott’s enigmatic (pun intended) Enigma, and Jonathan Mostow’s blockbusting submarine thriller U571, doing the heavy lifting. While U571 was a fabrication in every way, and Enigma’s fictional characters undertake actual historical dramatizations, it’s taken until The Imitation Game for the story of Allan Turing, here played by Benedict Cumberbatch, to be brought to life in any populist manner. The Imitation Game is a biopic replete with a terrific cast, high production values, and a really great story, and anyone with even a passing interest in history is advised to give this one a go. Told through a three-pronged narrative, The Imitation Game tries to detail the complexity of Turing’s life, as the father of theoretical computer science, and it mostly succeeds – if by intent one could consider it a success.

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