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.

That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)

Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.

Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.

No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)

It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?

Frankly, I’m not sure why.

It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.

The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.

Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.

Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.

And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.

A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?

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.

Reading Comics with Martyn Pedler

7pm, Monday August 9th

North Fitzroy library

240 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy Vic 3068

In the spirit of Thunderdome, I’ll be splitting the night down the middle. Half on the best of the indie / alternative scene and the particular joys of the comic book medium, and half on how to wade into the regularly insane world of superhero comics. Feel free to come along and tell me about whatever favourites I’ve missed.

Some exclamation points to get you excited:

Doom Patrol! American Splendor! Hellboy! Astro City! Jimmy Corrigan! Batman: Year One! From Hell! Casanova! Bottomless Belly Button! All-Star Superman! Eddy Current! Sandman! David Boring! Zot! Probably some X-Men, too!

If anyone’s bored in Melbourne on Monday night, it’d be great to see you.

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.

In one episode, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is trying to convince her parents to let her go to an upcoming concert by The Who. They decide to listen to one of the band’s albums first to see if they approve and, inevitably, find themselves interpreting the lyrics to Squeeze Box.

“Mama’s got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night /  She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…”

Her father isn’t impressed: “Just keep those boys away from your accordion!”

It got me thinking, though, about all the ways to secretly describe getting some in song. First some rules, though, because what’s sex talk without rules? (Chaos, that’s what.)  If we’re just talking about the sex act itself, then we disqualify other kinds of dirty euphemisms. All those songs that are bragging about a particular body part, for instance.

And we also discount artists who seem happier letting their lyrics stand naked than dressing them in metaphors. Missy Elliott’s Work It? Prince’s Mad Sex? I’m looking at you. I mean, hip-hop seemed to run out of metaphors – and spellcheckers – even before it reached Nelly’s Hot In Herre. “It’s gettin’ hot in here,” he crooned. “So take off all your clothes.”

(That’s just cause and effect, baby.)

What’s left is often A) edible, from 50 Cent’s Candy Shop to Warrant’s Cherry Pie. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer asked us to “Open up your fruit cage / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be.”

Or B) automotive. R. Kelly – whose Bump and Grind became a part of everyday speech – gave us the unforgettable gift of Ignition. “Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition”. “Girl, back that thing up so I can wax it, baby.” And Grace Jones’ post-disco classic Pull Up To The Bumper is hilariously dirty: “Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”

If wikipedia is to be believed, Pull Up To The Bumper was used on a children’s TV channel in 2002, and no one seemed to care. The thinnest metaphorical veil is usually enough to get away with anything. Remember Madonna’s performance at the Haiti telethon? It marked the moment where the whole world seemed convinced that Like A Prayer is actually about, you know, praying.

Once enough time has gone by, you don’t even need to disguise your lyrics. Familiarity turns everything to muzak. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side playing in my local supermarket. No one heard: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head…”

Everyone heard: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo…”

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.

The Jonah Hex movie has just been released, starring Josh Brolin as DC’s Old West anti-hero. It is, apparently, hellishly awful. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve already decided to forgive it some of its apparently glaring flaws – if only because it Todd DeZuniga says it was such a thrill to see his name in the credits. He’s the artist who co-created Jonah Hex way back in 1972, and he deserves all the thrills he can get.

To capitalise on the film’s release, DC have released a new hardcover graphic novel called No Way Back – a companion to the regular Jonah Hex series that’s been running for fifty-something issues now. Just like the series, it’s a solid example of stripped-down genre storytelling. The fact that almost every issue of Jonah Hex is a complete story, done-in-one, means it ditches most of the pleasures of ongoing continuity; instead, its writers – Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti – thrive on the tension that exists between repetition and variation.

Another corrupt sheriff, another bounty claimed, another woman who can’t be trusted. How do you make each different than the last?

The best thing about the graphic novel, though, is that DeZuniga returns to draw it. His artwork is sketchy and unpredictable: lines like they’re cut into the page, angry faces half-formed, all perfect for capturing the filth of Jonah’s world.

That’s why it’s entirely ridiculous that it’s printed on shiny, shiny paper.

DeZuniga’s art is fundamentally wrong for this plasticky stock. I know it seems like a superficial criticism, but as I read it dragged me out of the story like high-pitched squealing layered under a favourite song.

I’ve talked before about how some comic books – once intended to be disposable at best – sit uncomfortably in enormous, expensive hardcovers. That’s why I gave full credit to DC for its refusal to overly fancify its recent omnibuses collecting Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga.

(Yes, “fancify” is a word. Maybe you should buy a fancier dictionary and look it up.)

They’re printed on something like regular newsprint, just a little thicker. This decision caused what critic Tucker Stone called “the irritating paper debate”:

“…meaning that a lot of random websites and Amazon reviews are still crying foul about how DC decided to print these Kirby books on what seems to be all that Baxter paper left over from the 80s.”

I mean, how did “shinier” become synonymous with “better”? It’s not, no more than television in 16:9 widescreen is somehow automatically of higher quality than what’s shot in good old-fashioned 4:3.

I’d say that when even the cover of your graphic novel is faux-aged – with small tears and scuffed corners pre-added for maximum Old West authenticity – maybe it’s a sign you should rethink your high-gloss interior sheen.

For best results, read Jonah Hex: No Way Back after dragging it for a few miles behind your horse.

Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.

Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)

Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:

“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”

Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”

In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.

Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:

“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”

We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.

An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?

And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”

We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.