jddawson
Joined May 2002
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Reviews2
jddawson's rating
Anna Kokkinos' success with' Head On' now begins to look like it depended totally on the script and Alex Dimitriades great lead performance. The degree to which this latest, "The Book of Revelation" is both derivative , pretentious and utterly unoriginal ( except for Tristan Milani's fine cinematography) seems to bear this out. .
Alas, there have already been quite a few Aussie movies dealing with such themes , some reviled for 'sexism' (and/or explicit sex scenes) in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond and maybe they're worth looking at again after this piece of fluff. Of course, setting the whole thing in the world of ballet and making it all achingly slow (and in its choreography, like a 1960s Dutch Ballet experimental number) does suggest Great Art if you've not traveled around much-and then only if you never progressed beyond Art Theory 101.
Add to the pretension, appallingly arch dialog ( "you will do as we command...") and the whole shebang falls onto its well funded face. Then there are the 'sexy' bits : straight from Dario Argento.
Given the lovely but truncated performance by Colin Friels - how about a real city primeval thriller ?
All in, all ,with 'The Book of Revelation' , the feminist project has been set back yet another decade - and with the willing and deeply imitative (of male writers like Henry Miller, William Burroughs, even Bukowski) collaboration of some collective in Melbourne, Oz, suffering from a form of educational -and ideological- amnesia! No revelations await us here.
Alas, there have already been quite a few Aussie movies dealing with such themes , some reviled for 'sexism' (and/or explicit sex scenes) in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond and maybe they're worth looking at again after this piece of fluff. Of course, setting the whole thing in the world of ballet and making it all achingly slow (and in its choreography, like a 1960s Dutch Ballet experimental number) does suggest Great Art if you've not traveled around much-and then only if you never progressed beyond Art Theory 101.
Add to the pretension, appallingly arch dialog ( "you will do as we command...") and the whole shebang falls onto its well funded face. Then there are the 'sexy' bits : straight from Dario Argento.
Given the lovely but truncated performance by Colin Friels - how about a real city primeval thriller ?
All in, all ,with 'The Book of Revelation' , the feminist project has been set back yet another decade - and with the willing and deeply imitative (of male writers like Henry Miller, William Burroughs, even Bukowski) collaboration of some collective in Melbourne, Oz, suffering from a form of educational -and ideological- amnesia! No revelations await us here.
We saw this one at Cannes, 1980, where the audience - and the movie magazine Lumiere , in particular were more than a little bit in love with it. This may be because, unlike the IMDb website reviewers , they actually actually 'got' it . After all, two of the current IMDb website reviews are commenting on another film altogether: A Texas 'swamp movie' with a not dissimilar title...
Final Cut (1980) is basically a play on the idea of off the cuff documentary making carried to the limits and has lots of verbal and visual clues to this rather early post modern intent: after all how many other movies actually have the name 'Dziga Vertov' chucked around in dialog? Not that that's necessarily a good thing!
But the great hand-held cinematography by Ron Johanson and a marvelous- and for the time- very smart electronic soundtrack by UK film and TV composer Howard Davidson , all make this little super low budget movie an absolute keeper - and a film that's maybe worth watching a bit earlier in the night - and without a bottle of bourbon!
Final Cut may not entirely succeed, but at least the still loyal European Pay TV audiences and a healthily large worldwide group of (primarily) film student fans seem to have understood the film's self- referential movie shtick that the filmmakers seem to have - rather bravely - gone for!
Final Cut (1980) is basically a play on the idea of off the cuff documentary making carried to the limits and has lots of verbal and visual clues to this rather early post modern intent: after all how many other movies actually have the name 'Dziga Vertov' chucked around in dialog? Not that that's necessarily a good thing!
But the great hand-held cinematography by Ron Johanson and a marvelous- and for the time- very smart electronic soundtrack by UK film and TV composer Howard Davidson , all make this little super low budget movie an absolute keeper - and a film that's maybe worth watching a bit earlier in the night - and without a bottle of bourbon!
Final Cut may not entirely succeed, but at least the still loyal European Pay TV audiences and a healthily large worldwide group of (primarily) film student fans seem to have understood the film's self- referential movie shtick that the filmmakers seem to have - rather bravely - gone for!