File - Anthony Roberts - Freelance Writer

hasn’t
ers to
R29
The Wild Parrots
of Telegraph Hill
(G)
Madman Films
(feature runs
80 minutes)
Rental
★★★
Stephen Romei
EXTRAS: Making-of docos, music video
Stealth (M)
Sony Pictures
Home
Entertainment
(feature runs
121 minutes)
$39.95
★★1/2
disappoint those who enjoy their
machines fast and their pyrotechnics
loud. Suave leader of the squadron
Lucas (Sweet Home Alabama ) does an
admirable job and is well supported by
Biel (2003’s The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre ) and Foxx as his wingmen
(sorry, wingpeople). Sam Shepard is
also respectable as the commanding
officer with his own agenda.
Of course, a movie about a fighter jet
going insane wouldn’t be the same
without a romantic subplot and a scene
involving Biel’s character in a bikini and
a shirtless Lucas. Unnecessary? A little.
Anthony Roberts
AD
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SIGNA TURE: ED
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‘‘They are a lot purer than we are,’’
Bittner observes.
While the parrots start out as the stars
of this show, Bittner ends up stealing it.
He is an articulate, thoughtful man
who has decided to take a different path
in life. He is no anthropomorphist; he
knows the birds are not little people and
he treats them with no more than the
respect they deserve. When misfortune
strikes late in the film, he is remarkably
level-headed in response.
I will say no more, as there is a
surprising ending that reviewers have
been asked not to reveal. Suffice it to
say, Hitch would not have approved.
EXTRAS: 90 minutes of additional footage, including outtakes, updates and
special features; commentary by Mark Bittner; trailer
THE US government creates a state-ofthe-art navy stealth bomber powered by
artificial intelligence and designed to
take out some of the most dangerous
targets in the world. What could go
wrong? It gets struck by lightning and
starts blowing up Tajikistan.
Directed by adrenaline junkie Rob
Cohen (The Fast and the Furious , XXX )
and starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and
recent Oscar luminary Jamie Foxx as the
navy’s best and brightest, Stealth
delves into the world of AI and the
consequences of letting machines do all
the work.
This is hardly new ground.
Metropolis , Blade Runner , the
Terminator franchise and the recent
I, Robot have all explored the pitfalls of
‘‘smart’’ technology, and Stealth isn’t
breaking new ground on what could be
a fascinating technology, but that’s not
to say it doesn’t entertain.
Cohen is the master of the fast-paced
action flick, and this one won’t
CORRECTION
OK
IT was 40 years coming, but this is a
charming corrective to Alfred
Hitchcock’s misanthropic masterpiece
The Birds (1963), in which the avian
members of a San Francisco community
beat up Tippi Hedren, Australia’s Rod
Taylor and anyone else human-brained
enough to cross their path.
Twenty years before that, another
bird left a trail of death and misery in
the same city in John Huston’s The
Maltese Falcon .
Well, there’s no feathered
fiendishness in this gentle 2003
documentary by Judy Irvine, which
centres on a flock of wild parrots in the
Frisco district of Telegraph Hill and the
bum — in the nicest sense of that word
— who looks after them.
Mark Bittner, a fiftyish failed musician
who has never held down a job and lives
in a squat, feeds the parrots and nurses
them when they are ill or injured.
He names each bird, and rightly so,
as, like all animals, they are individuals
leading their own lives, however
modest.
PR OOF
EXTRAS: Five making-of featurettes, pieces on Dahl, squirrel wrangling, a piece on
Oompa Loompa Deep Roy and several fleetingly amusing games
98
dmin
Kerrie Murphy
6
with a stage mother. And, once again,
Danny Elfman’s score is a highlight.
The problem is Johnny Depp’s
Wonka. Seemingly modelled on
Michael Jackson, he isn’t a menacing,
ultimately benevolent fellow but an
outright weirdo, robbing the piece of
warmth. Wonka’s back story is fleshed
out, but this and the tweaks to the
ending make the movie about family —
a common theme for Burton, which is
fine — but negates the relevance of what
happens to the other four children.
5
Charlie and the
Chocolate
Factory 2-disc
Deluxe Edition
(PG)
(Feature runs
115 minutes)
$39.95
★★1/2
C
MY K 2
CMYK
bright red jacket
clearly bearing the
name of a safari company. And they do
move around: St Petersburg,
Venice,
Prague, Norway and Tuscany are just a few of
the destinations, so there are lots of bread-andbutter letters to write.
Vasilakis, 23, is a violinist whose profile is
rising in Australia, and one of the series’ more
pleasing inspirations is to have her playing a
little here and there. She’s a very pretty young
woman who sounds, bless her, as if she could
have come straight from the beach. ‘‘Now we’re
gunna see . . .’’ she says rather endearingly,
although perhaps in too great a contrast to
Callow’s rounded perfection of utterance.
But let’s stop carping. The photography is
lavish, the scenery a treat and the demands on
the viewer few. On a summer Sunday at
6pm it won’t offend, as long as you
don’t think too hard about just why
Matt and Niki are going dog-sledding.
Classical Destinations starts
tomorrow on SBS at 6pm.
ROALD Dahl’s tale of Charlie, a poor boy
and one of five children to win a tour of
the enigmatic, eccentric Willy Wonka’s
chocolate factory is enduring because
it’s hilarious, people satisfyingly get
their just deserts and it involves letting
loose in a chocolate factory — a dream
for me, even without the magic and
Oompa Loompas.
Combine my worship of all things
Wonka — including the Gene Wilder
movie — with an increasing
disappointment in director Tim Burton’s
work, and my hopes for this weren’t
high. His work is still visually arresting
but lacks the heart of earlier work such
as Beetlejuice .
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
looks great and has flashes of
brilliance, such as restoring Veruca
Salt’s comeuppance by squirrels
(changed to geese in the 1971 film) and
updating Violet Beauregarde
(AnnaSophia Robb) as an overachiever
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Vasilakis and Wills
but they do not refer
to him, and he shares
no screen time with
them. The Australians
and Callow make a
chalk and cheese combination. Former ABC
Classic FM presenter Christopher Lawrence
has written Callow’s elegant and interesting
script, although the half-hour format means
that in Vienna, Schubert, Brahms and Haydn
are dispatched in a brisk three minutes each.
Poor Vasilakis and Wills, meanwhile, get the
embarrassing task of trying to give some of the
promised insight into the interaction of place
and music while singing for the production’s
supper. Rarely has contra been rewarded so
unsubtly on screen. There are plentiful shots of
the sponsor airlines taking off and landing, and
Matt and Niki pop into certain hotels to offer
lavish praise about the comforts.
They take side trips that have nothing to do
with music but presumably something to do
with fulfilling obligations to tourist bodies, and
in the program on Finland, Wills pops up in a
DVDs
29
29
Travelling musicians: Simon Callow –
pictured in Prague, bottom – doesn’t turn
up in every city featured in Classical
Destinations ; Niki Vasilakis, below, gets to
play her violin here and there
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January 21-22, 2006