You know, Animal Kingdom is the Australian film I’ve enjoyed most in years.

Thank you very much. I haven’t seen the finished film yet, but I saw a rough cut a few months back and even then I was impressed. I thought that if it improves on this, it’s really going to be great. David’s ability to capture tone and mood is really chilling.

Do you approach an ensemble film like this differently than if you’re the leading man?

No, it’s the same. It has to be. On some level, whether you’re working on Neighbours or working on a 100 million dollar film, you still need to be as convincing as you can in front of the camera.

It’s interesting that lately you’ve played small – but important – roles in so many big films.

I know! I’m in Hurt Locker for about a minute, and people keep congratulating me. I feel like they’re mistaking me for somebody else. I was only filming for three days.

Did you intentionally decide to take these smaller roles?

Not at all. I want to play great roles, and I’d prefer to play leads. That’s my ego talking, I suppose. It can be much more satisfying to delve into something for a decent amount of time. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve dropped off the radar, but the best stuff that I was finding were smaller roles. So off I went.

I think you can frame this in a much more flattering light: you’ve put aside ego to choose the best films and not the flashiest roles…

Well, that’s honest, too. I’ve done things before that I haven’t been fully convinced by. I don’t want to fall into that trap again. It was very strange, though, to bookend these two great films – Hurt Locker and The Road – with their opening and closing scenes. And in between, I did Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories.

Uh, I hope Bedtime Stories doesn’t have too much in common with The Road.

Funnily enough, I was shooting Bedtime Stories when I had to fly to Pennsylvania for two days of The Road. I was in Goofy Adam Sandler World – and then I turned up on set to see Viggo Mortenson dying…

Are you a fan of award shows? Or do you avoid the Oscars like the plague?

My wife and I actually went to the Oscars this year. I was really adamant about hating award shows for the first 10 or 20 years of my working life. I still find them a bit silly, but I’ve become accepting of the fact they’re just how the industry works. It was really fun to go, and I was just really pleased for Kathryn Bigelow that her film did so well. It was unusual because twelve years ago I was also in a film that was up against a James Cameron juggernaut – Titanic. I still think that LA Confidential was the better film. So of course we’re all sitting at the Oscars this year going, well, I know how this is going to pan out. It’ll be Avatar. Kathryn might win best director, but James will win for his technological prowess…

As far as I’m concerned, Kathryn Bigelow deserved an Oscar for Near Dark in 1987! That’s an amazing film.

She’s an amazing filmmaker.

Do you think there’s a difference between being an actor and being a star?

I think a star’s someone who’s sitting at the top of the A-list. Someone who everybody knows, who can get any movie green-lit, who’s the first choice because it means bigger box office. And anybody who’s less known than that moves down the list – the B-list, the C-list. Obviously some people resonate with the greater population. They think: “I want him to be my hero”. Whereas with another actor, they might think: “Sure, he’s great, but he might be a bit confrontational, a bit dangerous. It’s great to see him in smaller roles but he might not be the guy I want to see as the lead.”

So they choose the actors who make them least nervous?

Yeah, that’s right: “At least we’ve got Tom Cruise…” But honestly – there aren’t many stars who aren’t also good actors, too.

This interview first appeared in jmag #40.

Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.

(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)

Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.

It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.

Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.

Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.

It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.

I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning  American-filmed version could do him justice.

And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.

Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.

SPLICE

Directed by: Vincenzo Natali

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac

Country: Canada

Many think Frankenstein was the first science fiction story. It tapped into something so powerful we’re still seeing new twists on the story today. This year it’s Splice, from the director of the 1997 lo-fi sci-fi Cube.

Sarah Polley (always excellent) and Adrien Brody (usually terrible, though pretty okay here) play a pair of gene-splicing scientists. Bored with using animal DNA, they introduce something human into the mix and soon have a gooey ‘daughter’ born with a stinger-tipped tail – and she’s growing fast.

Splice’s weighty ethical issues let it take itself pretty seriously for a movie that’s regularly so ridiculous. I mean, there are two pink lumps of Cronenbergian flesh licking each other with monster tongues in the first five minutes, and later there’s a sex scene that’ll keep fetish websites loaded with screengrabs.

But the best thing about Splice’s science-gone-wrong is how it asks the same question that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein asked back in 1818. What’s worse: children or parents? Splice says there’s enough horror in both.

Other reviews this month: Greenberg and The Ghost Writer in cinemas; Youth In Revolt, Cop Out, and Party Down: Season One on DVD.

Issue #42 on sale now.

So I’m especially pleased that it’s a success, both critically and at the early box office – because any time a non-franchise, non-remake, non-adapted blockbuster does well, it’s good for cinema in general. Weirdly, though, I’ve seen half a dozen reviews who take exception to one thing in particular: that Inception’s dream worlds don’t feel like dreams.

There’s a collection of these dream descriptions here: “curiously pedestrian”, “too literal-minded”, or reducing the human subconscious to “a routine action movie”.

Because dreams are, like, crazy! Why didn’t Nolan include a scene of my high school that also wasn’t my high school, you know? Or a clown, who’s just kind of there? Dude!

Inception features “dream architects”, deliberately constructing their own mental mazes, so it should be obvious these aren’t your usual, organic dreams. Inception’s characters project themselves inside them, or see their unconscious minds rushing in to fill their hypothetical spaces. It’s all more Wachowski than Freud, and Nolan has very little interest in the “Hey! Look! A backwards dancing dwarf!” non sequiturian style used by filmmakers like David Lynch to emulate dreaming on screen.

We barely even see the machine that allows them to network their dreams together – and why should we? What do we need to know other than when they press the button? And travelling between dream-states doesn’t come with swirling CGI tunnels like Avatar’s shifting consciousnesses. Nolan lets regular editing do all the work.

Over at IO9, Annalee Newitz says Inception will “change the way you watch movies”. Well, maybe. Maybe not. But she is dead right to suggest that Inception’s special effects sequences are “as much about how you stage an action scene as they are about the scenes themselves”.

For example: when dream-thief Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) asks his dream-victim Fischer (Cillian Murphy) why he can’t remember how they got here – how their scene actually began – it works as a quick flash of dream-illogic. But it also works much more powerfully as a reminder of how movies are edited. After all, we didn’t see the beginning of this scene, either. Like Buston Keaton in his masterpiece Sherlock Jr., we are all trapped between the edits, stitching the moments together as best we can.

Christopher Nolan has always been more of an architect than a storyteller, and sometimes that’s hurt his films. The Prestige, for instance, suffered from his determination to keep the three-act structure of a magic trick – because it meant leaving the big ta daaa! reveal until long after the audience had already guessed it. It benefited, however, from David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla, which is empirically awesome. See?

This time, Nolan’s obsession with structural puzzles don’t interfere with Inception’s story. They are its story. No matter what ambiguous concepts are whizzing around a scene, they’re in the service of one thing: action. Big, old-fashioned action. In fact, it contains numerous jaw-dropping action scenes – hardly “routine” – all constructed with real weight and gravity – and they cut through the film’s more pretentious moments like a hot bullet through butter.

That’s what makes this a more than worthy sequel to The Matrix – just ten years later than expected.

LOVE EXPOSURE

(AI NO MUKIDASHI)

Directed by: Sion Sono

Starring: Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Sakura Ando

Country: Japan

Love Exposure is a four-hour movie about an expert upskirt photographer – so saying it’s Japanese is probably redundant, isn’t it?

It begins with Yu being forced into confession by his Catholic father. At first he invents his sins, but soon decides to actually commit them. After he’s told that everything he seeks can be found “between a woman’s legs”, he becomes an urban ninja of voyeur photography.

That’d be enough insanity for most films, but Love Exposure is more ambitious. It’s also a family farce, redemptive love story, cross-dressing kung fu comedy, and hysterical psychodrama. Its relentless exploration of how religion and sex combine gives it unexpected depth among the erection jokes. (It uses the word “pervert” so often that somewhere John Waters’ ears are burning.)

Could it’ve been shorter? Sure. But I have no idea what could’ve been cut. I just pretended it was a TV miniseries and watched it in three chunks. When you watch it – and you should – I suggest you do the same.

Other reviews this month: the less-painful-than-expected Shrek Forever After in cinemas; Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland on DVD.

Issue #41 is on sale now.

HARRY BROWN

Directed by: Daniel Barber

Starring: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer

Country: UK

Michael Caine has always been a “working actor”, happy to accept a role now rather than wait around for something better. It’s why he’s been in so many great films as well as so many shockers. Harry Brown is somewhere in the middle.

This “vigilante pensioner” flick plays shamelessly into the story currently fuelling newspapers worldwide: KIDS THESE DAYS ARE SOCIOPATHIC MONSTERS WHO’LL KILL YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU, GRANDPA! Caine brings echoes of his legendary 1971 Get Carter hardarse to Harry – an elderly ex-marine who decides enough is enough. The emotional realism of his performance gives the movie a classiness that doesn’t mesh with its grimy, cartoonish thrills. (Especially the ridiculous digitally-added spurting blood.)

Most vigilante films pay at least a little lip-service to the fact that revenge is wrong – fun, sure, but wrong. Harry Brown has no such qualms. You’ll have to balance your desire to see Michael Caine kill teenage thugs with how dirty cheering him on might make you feel afterwards.

Other reviews this month: Fish Tank, Baghead, and True Blood: Season Two on DVD.

Issue #40 on sale now.

Yeah, it’s Thor’s hammer.

Just like the Samuel L. Jackson-as-Nick-Fury appearance that ended the first Iron Man, Thor’s hammer was basically meaningless unless you were already in the know; unless you’re already enough of a superhero fan to know its significance. (My audience was about one-quarter “wooo!”, three-quarters “huh?”)

And while the gag with Captain America’s half-finished shield in Tony Stark’s lab was fun, there were plenty of these other, oddly alienating moments in Iron Man 2. Why not have someone say the Black Widow’s codename out loud? Why not explain who the hell Nick Fury actually is – other than Samuel L. Jackson letting his eyepatch do his acting for him?

It gets really weird, however, when you remember that the Iron Man movies’ Nick Fury is based on the Ultimate Universe version of the character. He was reinvented by much-praised ‘cinematic’ artist Bryan Hitch to resemble movie-star Samuel L. Jackson – and therefore Jackson was cast as Fury for Iron Man’s first big cinematic finish. It was a bizarre self-fulfilling transmedia prophecy, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.

Superhero movies (and, apparently, their fans) have always loved their easter eggs. These nods to other characters and other worlds are a way to suggest the shared universes of the comics that spawned them. And why not? These thousands of characters and decades of stories are one of the primary appeals of Marvel and DC’s superhero comics.

In his article “The Superhero with a Thousand Faces”, Luca Somigli said there’s a reason why Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman made a pre-disfigured Joker the man who’d killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It was to approximate the years of animosity they have in the comic books. And when Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins revealed its Joker card at the film’s conclusion, it was a thrilling moment – not because it was to reward dedicated fans, but because the Joker is so part of pop-culture consciousness that everyone in the cinema knew exactly what it meant.

Now Marvel’s planned run of interlinked Avengers movies – Iron Man, The Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America, and Thor – will let them mimic their comic books in a whole new way. These individual films are planned to culminate in (Joss Whedon’s?) The Avengers, which’ll feature all these characters at once.

Comics often try to be like movies, and that risks ignoring the specific qualities of sequential art and serial storytelling that make them unique. Now the reverse is coming true, too. My concern with Marvel’s films aping their comics is that they’ll feel less like actual movies and more like pointless prologues. Like easter egg hunts with comic book in-jokes and poorly-defined character parades as prizes. Iron Man 2 enjoyed all the trappings of the Marvel universe, but sometimes forgot to give the uninitiated reason to care.

More and more, I think this interconnectedness – and the shying away from more radical and auteuristic interpretations of these heroes it requires – will mean a more cohesive universe, sure, but much less interesting films.

I did enjoy much of Iron Man 2 (although I felt that trying to recreate the free-wheeling feel of the first one meant every scene went on 15% too long). In the spirit of the post-credits stinger, though, here’s a teaser of my other major qualm about the movie:

Do the military medals that end up pinned to Tony Stark’s chest mean he’s just a weapons manufacturer again?

BAD LIEUTENANT – PORT OF CALL – NEW ORLEANS

Directed by: Werner Herzog

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

Country: USA

I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that Nicolas Cage was developing a new kind of acting that will only be properly understood by future generations. Kooky cop drama Bad Lieutenant – Port Of Call – New Orleans suggests maybe I was right.

Director Werner Herzog (of Grizzly Man fame) says it’s not a remake of the infamous Harvey Keitel film Bad Lieutenant; he says he hasn’t even seen it. It’s just another story about an out-of-control, drug-snorting cop. This one is set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, although it looks like it was filmed on leftover porn sets sometime in the mid-1980s.

The script – from a writer of TV cop shows like NYPD Blue – is nothing special, but the movie’s offbeat style makes it oddly fascinating. It’s like Herzog created an entire film from his lead actor’s DNA. After phoning in so many performances, Nicolas Cage gives this one everything he has. Even if you think his acting is laughable, this is a movie that gets the joke.

Other reviews this month: anthology film New York, I Love You, The White Ribbon, and The French Kissers.

Issue #39 on sale now.

“Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid?”

Why? I’m not sure. If these randoms see the film – and for free, too, which is something else that bugs Smith – and then these randoms write about it… well, they are film critics, right? They just won’t be paid for it. That might be the defining difference for Smith. If you love something, you should do it for free. Film critics demand to be paid. They’re inherently untrustworthy.

Spend too long on the internet and you’ll start to suspect that everyone hates film critics –even other film critics. Salon’s critic Andrew O’Hehir just wrote a blistering attack on fellow critics who publicly complain about the state of their chosen field. Here’s a taste:

“Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work. If you’re worried that people don’t want to read your movie reviews, what in the name of Jesus Christ crucified makes you think they want to read your bitching and moaning?”

I agree with much of his rant. I get to see movies for free and paid to write about them. It is, no doubt, pretty awesome, and it’s good to remember that. Complaining and commiserating about shrinking job opportunities for film critics is best done with like-minded friends, Glengarry Glen Ross-style, and not in grand, tear-stained open letters for all to read.

The part that really worries me, though, is how he suggests that if film criticism “isn’t funny and lively and engaging, it isn’t anything at all.”

I have no problem at all with “lively” and “engaging”. As an occasional academic, I’m constantly shocked by how bad the writing can be in published articles. It’s especially depressing when fun or ridiculous or otherwise hyperbolic art – like superhero comics – is dragged down by joyless analytic prose.

But “funny”? That’s what worries me. Why does everything need to default to comedy? Do lively, engaging, and even insightful reviews mean nothing unless they’re framed with boom-tish pop-culture zingers?

Everyone feels the urge to reach for a joke when they’re worried they’re boring their audience. Sometimes it works. Other times, it just means you’re worried your writing and ideas aren’t good enough, and you’re hoping to distract with a quick gag. Watching film critics scramble for laughs like first-timers at an open mic night isn’t funny – it’s depressing as hell.

Listen to “I’d Like to Spank the Academy” from this recent episode of This American Life. It contains a professor at Alabama’s University of Montevallo utterly destroying the other speakers at a regular debating event – because they’re all motivated solely by the laughter of the crowd. The spoonful of sugar that’s supposed to help medicine go down? It doesn’t work if you’re so busy shovelling sugar down the patient’s throat you forget the medicine altogether.

O’Hehir says that film criticism is more like “performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture”. Sure, I suppose. But why not make philosophy lecturers tell jokes, too? Wouldn’t that be more entertaining? And why not all movies while we’re at it? I always felt like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon needed more slapstick…

(Please assure Kevin Smith that I wrote the above for free.)

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY

Directed by: Michael Moore

Country: USA

“Capitalism is evil”. That’s a direct quote from Capitalism: A Love Story, the latest of Michael Moore’s documentaries about what’s wrong with America. (In case you’re wondering, the answer is: a lot, actually.)

In his sledgehammer style, Moore wades into the US economy: families evicted from homes; hilariously evil memos leaked by major companies; profits made on human misery; all ending with post-Katrina New Orleans and demands for revolution.

Fans of his mid-90s TV Nation series will find even fewer stunts this time, and those that remain – like driving an armoured car to bailout banks and demanding money back – are weak. Instead, Moore relies on sincere voiceover, melodramatic music, and ironic stock footage to spice up his interviews.

It’s effective enough, too. It’s just hard to watch Moore using the same leading questions, manipulative visuals, and fear-mongering that are usually considered the domain of his political opponents. Does refusing to use those same underhanded tactics make you noble – or just naive? I honestly don’t know.

Other reviews this month: Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs in cinemas, and Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, Paranormal Activity, and FOX’s Glee on DVD.

Issue #38 on sale now.